Rethinking my stance on mold pre-heat for steel pours

I mean, I always thought skipping the pre-heat was fine to save time on our steel jobs. But after we got a bunch of porous castings last month, I tried pre-heating the molds to 500 degrees. The difference was night and day, no more defects. Idk, maybe it's just me, but I won't skip it again.

3 comments

3 Comments

price.tara1mo ago

Yeah, learning that lesson the hard way is the worst (and most expensive, honestly). I fought our shop foreman on pre-heat for ages, calling it a waste of time. Ended up with a whole batch of scrap that looked like Swiss cheese. It's one of those steps that feels slow but actually saves so much time on the back end fixing bad pours.

elliotramirez1mo ago

That night and day difference happened on my last job too.

annanguyen27d ago

I mean, I've skipped pre-heat before on some smaller stuff and it turned out fine. Maybe it depends on the metal or the shop conditions. It just seems like one of those things that gets treated as a huge deal every single time, but idk if it's always that serious. Could just be my luck though.