As a buyer for iron castings, you may always wonder how to estimate the reasonable prices of your iron casting parts, to evaluate the quotations from your potential suppliers. Since the machining costs are more complex, so we can not make it clear in one article, but as for the price of rough castings, we can briefly introduce its main aspects.

Rough casting cost means the price for the rough castings without any machining, heat treatment, surface coating, packing and freight costs.

Iron foundries usually make the quotation for rough castings based on their rough weights. For example, if currently the price rate of green sand castings is about 1.35 USD/kg, and the rough casting weight of your iron part is 10 kg, then its cost is 13.5 USD/pc.

However, you must know some important factors.

1. Rough weight of castings

One is the rough casting weight is usually 5% to 40% higher than machined castings. For example, if your finished or machined part is 10 kg, then its rough casting weight may be 10.5 to 17.0 kg. Do not be surprised! This is possible and reasonable. Almost all professional iron foundries will calculate the rough casting costs by this way. Even the iron foundries are in charge of the machining, they still need to calculate the rough casting cost by this way, because the machining iron chips will become the scraps and very cheap. Although the iron foundries may reduce the price rate considering the extremely high machining allowance, but they still calculate by the rough casting weights.

2. Suitable casting process

Secondly, the green sand casting process is the cheapest production process. If your parts need to use the resin sand casting process, shell molding process, investment casting process or others, then price rate will not be 1.35 USD/kg, and will cost more. You could check the website of dandong foundry in China, then you will see the latest price rates for all sand casting processes.

3. Material grades of iron castings

Thirdly, if the material of your parts are not normal grey cast iron, but grey iron of high grades, such as ASTM A48 Class 45 or 50, ductile iron or alloy cast iron, then the price rate will be higher.

4. Complexity of Castings

Fourthly, if your casting parts are very complex, especially with complex inside structures, then it will be more expensive since they will need more sand cores and production time.

5. Sizes of iron castings

Fifthly, if your casting parts are very small, such as under 2kg, then their price rates will be higher than normal weights because of more production time and more cleaning and grinding works.

In addition, the annual demand is always a important factor to the price of rough castings and machining. The iron foundries will consider to reduce the prices for the orders with large annual demand. Likewise, they will consider to increase the prices for the small orders.

Moreover, the all of iron foundries in China will calculate their production costs by RMB yuan, therefore, you should take the exchange rate of RMB to USD into consideration. If the exchange rate changes over 2%, then the price of USD should be adjusted accordingly.

After talking so much, you must be still confused about the prices of rough iron castings. Yes, this is reasonable since only the professional iron foundries and engineers could make the accurate quotation based on your drawings, however, you still could check the website of Dandong Foundry to get an approximate price.

This article was from Dandong Foundry. For the whole article, please check Dandong Foundry Blog.