Our Services
Engineering Support
Our project engineering team provides organisations peace of mind with their specialist knowledge and expertise. We provide support every step of the way to deliver your project.
Blackwood provides engineering expertise to give you added value in your casting sourcing. Our engineers will work closely with you and the selected foundry to manage every aspect of the project.
We will guide you from the design phase, prototyping, pre-production through to final production, making the process as smooth and as painless from your perspective.
We can provide help and advice in the following areas.
Discuss Your Requirements
Get in touch with our expert team to discover how we can help with your organisations engineered castings and counterweight requirements.
DESIGN
We are here to assist in the early stages of your project when you perhaps seek some engineering input from a design perspective.
Our engineers will work closely with your product designers to ensure that the most cost-effective design is achieved whilst advising on the full feasibility of the product and its production process.
We provide a direct communication channel to our foundry engineers, enabling us to provide a quick response to any design changes.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
You can rest assured that we will manage the whole project for you, from the initial design concept and drawings through to delivery of the final product to meet your production requirements.
Our engineering team are pro-active in assisting you in many aspects of the process, such as cost reduction, product design, packaging and logistics.
Our track record and established history of executing projects from conception to production quantities allows you to focus on other issues, giving you the peace of mind that your casting project is progressing smoothly in good hands.
New Product Introduction (NPI)
During the New Product Introduction (NPI) stage of a project we adopt the tools of Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) such as:
- DFMEA,
- Process Control Planning, SPC,
- Design and manufacture of all in-process checking media
- Attribute gauging
- Design and manufacture of delivery stillages
MATERIALS
We specialise in a full range of grey iron, ductile (SG) iron and steel castings.
Grey Iron is the most commonly used and cheapest material counterweights, which generally have non-structural requirements. Whilst not as ductile as SG Iron, we have great experience in using this material to produce large thin walled counterweights, often used to form the machines exterior styling requirements. Typical grades used are GJL 180, 200 and 250.
Ductile Iron, commonly referred to as SG (Spheroidal Graphite) Iron has higher mechanical properties than that of grey iron. This is due to the carbon/graphite being being sphreoidal in shape, unlike grey iron where they are more laminar/flake in shape. This results in higher tensile and ductile properties, which is more suitable for complicated parts where load and impact resistance is a requirement. We provide a full range of ductile iron grades.
Steel offers the highest mechanical properties and its low carbon content makes it ideal to be used within weld assemblies, with other alloys making it suitable for castings that have a high structural requirement.
PROTOTYPING/SAMPLING
We work with you from the early stages of your project. We realise that before you are ready for full production, prototype and pre-series castings are likely to be required.
We can fully support you in this process, either from temporary prototype or full production tooling. We can do this either through our UK partner foundries or through the China route.
During the sampling stage in China, we communicate directly with the foundry, keeping you up to date on the manufacturing and inspection process. We will discuss any potential casting or capability concerns with you.
We can also expedite pattern manufacture to ensure your tight lead times are able to be met.
