Changing With the Times

When asked what makes his metalcasting facility a good business, Smith goes in a number of different directions: “…120 years of combined experience…good vision for the future…use of technology…reinvesting.” Similarly, Wolverine Bronze historically has gone in a number of different directions, depending on the needs of the markets it serves, or wants to serve.

In 1960, Wolverine Bronze was an approximately 1,200-sq.-ft. job shop serving the low-production automotive tooling market—a market that produced a number of peaks and valleys. So in 1988, the company installed a second metalcasting plant to smooth out its customers’ consumption. The nobake plant was intended to produce larger tooling components primarily for the aerospace industry, with some automotive customers mixed in. For a decade and a half, that business remained relatively steady. But in the early 2000s, some of the demand for large aluminum tooling began to taper.

That’s when the company moved into the precision sand game. The precision sand process, designed for Wolverine Bronze by Kurtz Industrial Technology Companies, Kreuzwertheim, Germany, and Vulcan Engineering, Helena, Ala., is intended to minimize defects and produce a tight grain structure with high dimensional control. Only a handful of metalcasting facilities in the world have precision sand casting capabilities, each of which is unique. In Wolverine Bronze’s version of the process, a pressurized inert gas forces molten aluminum up through a tube from the furnace and into the bottom of the mold. Molten metal continues to feed the casting under pressure until it has completely solidified, starting at the most distant points and freezing back toward the fill tube.

With the introduction of the precision sand line, Wolverine Bronze became a two-facility, nonferrous job shop serving the automotive and aerospace industries with aluminum, copper and bronze castings from a few ounces to 60,000 lbs. Through various subsidiaries and alliances, it also was in position to manufacture and distribute a product line of cast aluminum and welded steel bases, standard fixture components, and special application bases and castings. The company had diversified to the point where it was no longer relying solely on automotive customers, but immediately following the installation, the opportunity for another alliance came along that would cause the facility to reinvent itself again.