Stainless Foundry & Engineering Inc.

to about 200 pounds in castings.We’ve got 14 wax presses, fully-automated dip lines, and seven fur- naces in the investment casting division ranging in capacity from 190 pounds up to 1,000 pounds.Hav- ing the various furnace sizes allows us to do custom specifications or custom alloy configurations. “So, if a customer has a standard ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) specification and they want to make some minor modifications to it to get different properties out of the product,we can do that without having to charge them for a full furnace size or a full heat size, because we do have such variability and that flexibility to customize the end customer’s product.And, unlike our competitors, we have the experience and technical expertise from over 70 years of working to high specification requirements, so we can do the job right the first time.We offer a lot of diverse things from prototypes to stocking programs, from raw castings to finished assemblies.” While most of SFE’s products are shipped to its domestic customers, Stachowiak reports that the company is currently working to expand its interna- tional footprint.“We had two members of our team participate in the ACHEMATrade Show (the world forum for chemical engineering and the process in- dustry) over in Germany, this past summer.We have a proprietary alloy called ILLIUMAlloy 8,which is a non-galling alloy that primarily has been used in the food and dairy pumping applications in positive displacement pumps for rotors.” Galling is a form of wear caused by adhesion be- tween sliding surfaces.When a material galls, some of it is pulled with the contacting surface, especially if there is a large amount of force compressing the surfaces togeth- er. Galling is most commonly found STAINLESS FOUNDRY & ENGINEERING INC. in metal surfaces that are in sliding contact with each other, so various alloys are often chosen for bearings, bushings, and other sliding applications because of their resistance to galling.Where product purity is important, ILLIUMAlloy 8 is a nickel-based alloy that provides excellent galling resistance and can be used in devices which have metal to metal contact and which require corrosion resistance to a wide variety of chemicals.“Ten percent of our cus- tomer base is international and it tends to be more of the unique alloys. So,we’re working to expand the use of that alloy with various customers where they could benefit from running much tighter tolerances or even running metal on metal to boost the perfor- mance of their products,” says Stachowiak. Another recent agenda item is SFE’s newmarket- ing initiative.“We’ve started developing more web- site contact information, getting ourselves out there and using a B2B application on the internet,”Sta- chowiak notes.“We’re finding more and more of our customers are doing their research on the internet and finding their prospective suppliers there.They want to do that homework first and, once they’re satisfied that you have the capabilities to meet their needs, that’s when they’re going to contact us and request a quote. So,we really see the landscape