Released Oct. 4, 2007. 

Foundry Solutions & Design Co., Atlanta, Ga., recently completed the engineering design for a steel railroad metalcasting facility in the Leningrad region of Russia.

The same American engineering team also designed the current largest iron metalcaster in Russia, the Kamaz Plant, in 1973-1974.

The annual capacity of the new facility will be 70,000 metric tons of steel castings for the Russian rail industry. Sideframes, bolsters and end-of-car castings will be produced at this facility on an automated molding line with a flask size of 1900 x 2800 x 500/500 mm.  In addition, the molding line will utilize flexible automation for core setting and mold preparation.

Casting cleaning and finishing, as designed, also will be automated and includes specially developed systems for gate and riser removal before shot blasting, CNC grinders for consistent material removal and robotic finishing cells for casting finishing and gauging.  Each finishing cell will be outfitted with an automatic tool change cartridge, casting gauging will be automated utilizing touch probes, laser scanning and vision systems.

Process flow has been observed in all cases and material handling has been given special consideration to minimize the dependence on manual intervention. The facility is a machine-paced operation.