CIREX is one of the largest lost wax foundries in the world. By means of the lost wax method, high quality investment castings are produced with complex shapes and high dimensional accuracy. Besides that, this process offers a great degree of freedom in design and material choice. Your specific wishes and demands can be incorporated into the castings. By our decades long experience with the lost wax method, we can assure you a very efficient production process and top quality castings.
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CIREX is a supplier of precision castings which are cast by using the lost wax technique. These castings are characterized by low surface roughness values and precise tolerances. Lost wax castings are also known as the highest quality steel castings available on the market. They are often applied in environments where the quality demands are high, because the components usually operate in environments which are aggressive (hostile), subjected to large differences in temperature or they are required to be especially hard, strong or light. Because of these specific and high demands, special alloys are often utilised for these castings.
PropertiesDescription Shape tolerance: Freedom in style and design Roughness: High surface quality & low roughness values (Ra 1.6 6.3 µm) Dimensional tolerances: High dimensional accuracy and precise tolerances (VDG P690 D1) Materials: Virtually any steel alloy can be cast Complexity: Complex shapes can be cast as a single component Machining: Little to no machining is required Undercuts: Products with undercuts can be castStep 1: Mould engineering & production
CIREX is one of the largest lost wax foundries in the world. By means of the lost wax method, high quality investment castings are produced with complex shapes and high dimensional accuracy. Besides that, this process offers a great degree of freedom in design and material choice. Your specific wishes and demands can be incorporated into the castings. By our decades long experience with the lost wax method, we can assure you a very efficient production process and top quality castings.
Step 2: Wax model spraying & Tree building
The mould is filled with liquid wax. After the wax has been cooled down, ejectors in the mould push the wax model out. A wax model has now been sprayed which is identical to the final casting. These wax models are glued onto a so-called wax tree with a casting funnel on top, into which steel is poured in a later stage off the process.
Step 3: Rinsing the wax trees
After the wax models have been glued onto a wax tree, they are rinsed. Any possible contaminations on the surface are removed to ensure a successful attachment of the ceramic onto the wax tree.
Step 4: Building ceramic layers
After rinsing the wax tree, the tree is given a fireproof ceramic shell. This shell is constructed after repeatedly submerging the tree (up to 7 or 9 times) in a slurry and sprinkle it with ceramic sand. The ceramic layers are then hardened in a drying chamber where they are exposed to air.
Step 5: Autoclave
After the layers have been formed and dried, the wax is melted out of the ceramic tree by using steam (120°C) in an autoclave. This is why it is called lost wax casting. The majority of the molten wax can be regenerated and is reusable.
Step 6: Sintering
The ceramic tree is then baked (stoked) at high temperatures of around °C and reaches its final strength through the sintering process. Any wax remains are burned out during this process.
Step 7: Casting
The desired steel alloy is melted in a large furnace of 800kg and brought to cast temperatures. The ceramic tree is, at the same time, heated in a oven to prevent thermal shocks during the pouring process. After the tree has been heated, it is removed from the oven by a robotic arm and filled up with a steel alloy by use of counter gravity. When the trees have been poured, they are placed on a cooling conveyor where they are cooled down. (with nitrogen).
Stap 8: Finishing
The trees are then removed from their ceramic shell, by using a fully-automatic hammer to break the shell. This removes the majority of the ceramic. The next step is to cut the products from the trees by sawing or vibrating. The steel leftovers will be sorted based on alloy and can be melted again during the next casting session.
Step 9: Blasting, grinding and visual inspection
The Finishing Department removes the last pieces of ceramic by means of steel, sand and/or water blasting. The ingate which remained after the sawing process, is grinded from the casting. To grind the product properly, a grinding fixture is often applied.
The Quality Department checks all products visually for possible casting failures. This check takes place according to a quality standard sheet to ensure that all possible surface failures are corrected properly. Due to this procedure you can be assured that CIREX only delivers high quality castings.
Step 10: Machining and heat- and surface treatment
CIREX has the capabilities to machine castings in house, such as drilling holes, tapping threads and turning & milling activities. This enables CIREX to deliver a completely machined component that is ready-to-install.
Some alloys require heattreatment to achieve a certain hardness, tensile strength or elongation according to 2D drawing specifications. The standard heattreatments are performed in-house, the complex treatments are outsourced. CIREX also has the know-how to perform a surface treatment for a casting.
Surface treatments involves the coating process of a steel surface, to enhance the looks of the surface or protect it against external influences such as corrosion (rust) and natural wear (damage).
Step 11: Final inspection
The final step in this process is another visual check and when necessary composing a measurement report and material analysis. After the final inspection, the products are ready for shipment to another satisfied CIREX customer.
CIREX is your reliable partner in the field of lost wax casting. We highly value a good client relationship, which largely determines the success of a project. In good cooperation with you as our customer, we would like to act as a development partner, sharing our thoughts and ideas about product design, material choice, measurements or any necessary machining. All of this is matched exactly to your needs and wishes. The goal is to achieve an optimal casting through joint dialogue. CIREX is your partner when it comes to successful castings!
3D printed jewelry patterns and cast metal rings.
Lost-wax casting is a metal casting technique for creating objects, from simple to complex, in a variety of metals (such as gold, silver, brass, or bronze) by casting an original model or pattern.
It is one of the oldest known metal-forming techniques dating back 6,000 years, but it is still widely used for producing jewelry, dentistry, and art. Its industrial form, investment casting, is a common way to create precision metal parts in engineering and manufacturing.
While traditionally associated with artisanal handcraft, creators can now transform the lost-wax casting process with digital design and 3D printing to simplify the workflow, save time, lower costs, and reshape the process for the 21st century.
Read on to learn how digital technologies have revitalized the lost-wax casting method and what it means for professionals from jewelers to dentists and volume producers.
Patterns sprued to a casting tree.
Molten metal poured into the investment.
The lost-wax casting process can differ depending on the industry and application, but it generally consists of the following steps. Cast parts can be made from a wax model itself, called the direct method, or from replicas of the original wax model, called the indirect method. The direct method jumps from step one straight to step four.
Model-making: The artist carves a design out of wax. The size and complexity of the wax model are limited to the wax carvers skill and the capacity of their casting equipment.
Creating a mold: A caster then casts this model and polishes the casting to produce a master pattern. The master model is used to make a wax mold out of rubber, which is heated and vulcanized around the master casting to make a flexible wax mold.
Producing wax patterns: Molten wax is injected or sometimes poured into the rubber mold. This can be done over and over to make copies of the original design.
Assembling the wax pattern: Sprues are added to the wax copies and theyre connected to create a tree-like structure, which provides paths for the molten wax to flow out and molten metal to later fill the cavity.
Applying investment materials: The wax tree is either dipped into a slurry of silica, or put into a flask and surrounded by the liquid investment plaster.
Burnout: After the investment material dries, the flask is placed upside down into a kiln, which melts the wax leaving a negative cavity in the shape of the original model.
Pouring: The investment mold is further heated in a kiln to reduce the temperature difference with the molten metal. Metal is melted and then poured, using gravity or vacuum pressure to pull the metal into the cavity.
Devesting: Once the molten metal has cooled somewhat, the investment mold is quenched in water to dissolve the refractory plaster and release the rough casting. The sprues are cut off and recycled, while the cast parts are cleaned up to remove signs of the casting process.
Finishing: The cast parts are filed, ground, machined, or sandblasted to achieve final geometry and surface finish. Where necessary, the cast parts are also heat-treated to enhance the mechanical properties of the material.
The cast tree after divesting.
The cast part finished by filing, grounding, and machining.
Its no exaggeration to state that lost-wax casting is as old as civilization itself. Artifacts like scepters, sculptures, and furniture made through lost-wax casting have been discovered as far afield as Israel, Vietnam, Nigeria, Nicaragua, and the Indus Valley. The very oldest known lost-wax-cast object, an amulet created by a society in the Indus Valley, is over 6,000 years old.
After centuries of use in the production of sculptural ornaments and in textile relief, lost-wax casting began to be supplanted by piece molding in 18th-century Europe. Parts of the process were adapted for investment casting to meet the needs of the growing industry in the 19th century.
In dentistry, lost-wax methods are used widely to create gold crowns, inlays, and onlays. The legacy of lost-wax casting, as such, remains well in evidence today.
Today, digital software tools and 3D printing augment lost-wax casting with the advantages of a digital design and manufacturing process.
Digitally Design Pattern
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3D Print Pattern
Prepare For Casting
Make Mold and Burn Out Printed Parts
Cast Pattern
Polish and Finish the Part
With the digital workflow, designers use CAD software tools to create designs digitally and a professional 3D printer to produce 3D printed patterns that can then be cast in the mold. After burnout of the positive pattern, the process follows the same path as traditional investment casting.
Thanks to digital techniques, the need for time-intensive manual labor is greatly reduced and the design itself is easy to preserve, modify, and recreate when needed.
From engineers to jewelry makers, various professional fields are taking advantage of the new possibilities enabled by digital technologies for lost-wax casting.
One of lost-wax castings first use cases was for producing jewelry and fine ornaments. But wax patterns for intricate jewelry are complicated to produce by hand, and in a world driven by high demand and fast fashion, it can be difficult for hand-crafted pieces to keep pace.
Jewelry designers can use jewelry CAD software tools to design jewelry pieces, making it easier to produce and fit complicated geometries that once required hours of meticulous labor to carve from wax.
Digital design, advanced materials, and affordable in-house resin 3D printers are now changing the way jewelry manufacturers and designers work in terms of concepting, prototyping, and producing.
Stereolithography 3D printing can reproduce complex features thatd be difficult to hand carve.
Jewelry designers can use jewelry CAD software tools to design jewelry pieces, making it easier to produce and fit complicated geometries that once required hours of meticulous labor to carve from wax.
Affordable industrial-quality 3D printers can create patterns rapidly that can be cast just like traditional wax. 3D printing offers an almost unlimited scope for geometric creativity in design. Thanks to a precisely controlled laser, extraordinary design details delicate filigrees, raised text, and detailed pavé stone settings can be captured with incredible sharpness.
The biggest barriers to adopting a digital workflow in jewelry are often digital design skills and training. However, newer cohorts of jewelry designers entering the industry are taught the foundations of traditional design along with jewelry CAD software and training on 3D printers, preparing them for the inevitable transition.
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In this white paper, learn how to cast fine jewelry pieces from 3D printed patterns and how direct investment casting, or lost wax casting, works as a moldmaking technique.
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Lost-wax casting and pressing restorations have been standard practice in dentistry for decades to fabricate inlays, onlays, crowns, ceramicalloy crowns, all-ceramic crowns, partial denture frameworks, and other implant restorations.
Wax patterns are traditionally formed by hand on a working die of the tooth or an arch model that is based on a manual impression from the patient. The patterns are then sprued to a tree and burned out, following the traditional lost-wax casting workflow.
With digital technologies, dentists collect the patients anatomy digitally using an intraoral scanner, or a lab scans a physical model or impression using a desktop scanner. The scan data gets imported into CAD software and the dental technician designs the desired restorations. The patterns can then be 3D printed out of a wax-like material, and cast or pressed using the traditional workflow.
Patterns for dental crowns, inlays, partial denture frameworks, and more can then be 3D printed out of a wax-like material, and cast or pressed using the traditional workflow.
In dentistry, digital design is also not much of a limitation, since the patient's anatomy comes from an impression. Dental CAD software tools make the design process simple, while 3D printing automates the manufacturing process of the patterns that traditionally requires an experienced technician and many manual steps.
Digital technologies with lost-wax casting combine the best of the analog and digital worlds and empower dental labs to produce highly accurate patterns, with a consistent and reliable digital workflow and easy-to-use machinery.
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Learn how to produce fixed restorations in-house, and hear shares practical tips for building digital production workflows for casting and pressing crowns, bridges, and removable partial dentures (RPDs).
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For industries requiring mass-produced metal parts with a high level of dimensional accuracy, casting remains a cost-effective and highly capable manufacturing process, producing critical components for aerospace, automotive, and medical applications.
Traditionally, patterns for direct investment casting, the industrial form of lost-wax casting, are carved by hand or machined if the part doesnt need to be mass-produced. With 3D printing, engineers and foundries can directly create patterns to achieve shorter lead times and geometric freedom that exceeds the design for manufacturability (DFM) constraints of molding processes.
Webinar
This webinar will walk you through the methods by which several established foundries were able to cast metal parts using patterns 3D printed on Formlabs 3D printers. Learn how foundries are cutting costs, reducing lead times, and improving the quality of their metal parts by integrating Formlabs Clear Cast Resin and Materialise Magics Lattice with traditional casting methods.
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White Paper
This white paper presents the methods by which several established foundries were able to cast metal parts using 3D printed patterns produced by Formlabs stereolithography (SLA) 3D printers.
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The evolution of the lost-wax casting process with digital tools proves that technology doesnt need to alienate us from the past. Employed correctly, these techniques can produce high-quality parts at scale from bespoke custom jewelry to mass-produced automotive parts. The result is a remarkable new degree of production efficiency and design freedom.
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