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Since 1965 Skaigh has
been developing new customers and products through the principles of cost price
tooling and in-house heat-treatment of castings - at no extra cost.
Skaigh
Engineering offer a
gravity-die service for light alloy castings - from design assistance to
finished, heat-treated, machined castings in aluminium & zinc
aluminium. We also oun a small sand casting facility for prototypes
and small batch work.
Why Casting?
Casting offers the designer the
opportunity to achieve near net shape solutions to a huge variety of problems,
in a wide range of materials, quantities, and sizes; from tiny, for example a
tooth on a zip fastener, to 280 tonnes, the largest casting made in the UK.
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Aluminium?
Aluminium's advantages
can be summarised as lightness, rapid machinability, corrosion
resistance and suitability for volume manufacture. Iron and
aluminium are the two most widely used metals for casting. Aluminium
has a very low density - it is only one-third the weight of steel.
When used in the transport industry this means that vehicles can be more
fuel-efficient.
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Why gravity
die-casting?
For low volume, very
large or very complicated castings, sand casting is the usual
route, where a pattern is relatively cheap, but the casting is
expensive. For very high volumes pressure die-casting is
the answer, as high tooling costs are offset by much lower unit costs.
Gravity die-casting falls in the middle ground where tooling is
not prohibitively expensive, but savings on casting costs can bring the
break-even point down to as low as 200 units.
Why Skaigh?
This break-even point is
further reduced at Skaigh
as we provide tooling at cost price in house. Tooling can also be
made from customer's own files. Heat-treatment is carried
out on site, and we have recently invested in a state-of-the-art machine
shop to machine our own castings. |
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