There are many factors that will affect the sand casting costs. Herein, we list some main factors, and hope these information could be helpful to casting buyers.

1. Pig iron and steel scrap costs

The pig iron and steel scarp are the main materials to cast iron and cast steel, so their prices will directly affect the costs of sand castings.

2. Alloy costs

If your parts need to add alloys such as Cr, Ni, Cu and Mo, then their prices will be more expensive than normal metal grades.

3. Casting processes

Different casting processes will largely affect the costs of castings. The cheapest is the green sand casting process, then resin sand casting is more costly, and the pre-coated resin sand casting process (e.g. hot shell and core molding process) will be the most expensive process.

4. Resin cost

As for the castings made by resin sand and pre-coated resin sand casting processes, the resin price will affect the costs of castings, but it will not affect the green sand casting process.

5. Size and weight of castings

As for the small castings with weight under 1 kg, its price per kg will be much more expensive comparatively than larger castings since they will cause more production time and grinding works.

6. Sand cores

If the production to your parts need to use the sand cores, then its cost will be higher than that without sand cores. It is because the sand cores need to be produced separately.

7. Other factors

In addition, there are many other factors. The annual demand is larger, then their prices will be lower. More simple sand castings will be more cheaper. The material grades will affect the difficulty of production and heat treatments, so higher material grades will be more costly. The higher requirements to the surface quality and casting defects will cause higher production costs because of rejection ratio. Moreover, there are other factors such as the machining cost, painting and packing costs.

Therefore, they are many factors that have influence to sand casting costs. So, it is inaccurate to estimate its costs just by one calculation formula. The foundries need to consider these factors according to the experience of production and current prices of materials and labors.

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