"If pictures are worth 1000 words, then prototyping is worth 1000 meetings.” This popular saying perfectly encapsulates the role prototyping plays in the manufacturing space. Prototyping is the most crucial process in the product journey, from the moment it is conceptualized until its mass production.

The first step of prototyping is casting the concept model. Among the casting processes leveraged today, investment casting is the oldest and one of the most efficient metal-forming techniques. At its core, the investment casting process is simple: create a CAD model, form a mold, pour the metal into it, and then machine it. At most, it takes 6 to 8 weeks before the prototype is ready. But that is not all. It then has to go through a multitude of tests, which can sometimes take months. But is that good enough or fast enough for your product?

“The way we look at it, it’s not good enough,” says Marc Riquelme, president of Signicast—a precision investment casting company. “For this very reason, we have incorporated the most advanced technologies, automating almost every step of the investment casting and prototyping process. We can address all your prototyping needs in one place, from enhancing the prototype design to making it ready for mass production.”

Why Signicast?

A small, family-owned company that set its roots in 1959, Signicast has grown into one of the leading providers of investment casting and prototyping solutions. Its dedication to innovation and quality has placed it in a class of its own. With eleven first-class facilities worldwide, it provides unparalleled capabilities for clients to operate faster, more efficiently, and more profitably.

In an industry where most prototyping houses stick to a cookie-cutter approach, Signicast differentiates itself by offering a variety of prototyping and manufacturing options to clients based on the lead time, quality, budget, and several other factors. Through innovation and efficiency, Signicast is successfully cutting down the throughput time required for the investment casting process. “Rather than offloading the pressure on the clients, we help them choose the processes that can best serve their needs,” mentions Pete Lorenz, vice president of sales at Signicast. In addition, the company contributes to speeding up the entire development process by bringing actionable insights to their clients, rather than having them go to different sources.

Bringing Ease and Simplicity into Manufacturing

Due to the flexibility and efficiency offered by Signicast, an increasing number of clients are approaching the company for their prototyping needs. To cater to this new inflow, Signicast has assigned a dedicated team to support the prototyping side of the business.

Signicast has even been augmenting its capabilities over the last few years in line with client demands. Apart from using stereolithography (SLA) patterns, the company is incorporating wax printing machines and collaborating with partners that provide ceramic shell printing to broaden its choice of offerings to the clients.

Rather than offloading the pressure on the clients, we help them choose the processes that can best serve their needs

Besides, the company also features a unique tool shop that allows it to conduct low volume production runs and support the customers from the initial stages of development till the end stages of the production cycle.

What makes clients choose Signicast over its competitors is its ability to 3D print metals. The company leverages high-speed machining to shape billet materials. Owing to its comprehensive tool shop, the company can rapidly swap between different tools, thus significantly reducing production lead times. Also, as the tool shop is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, clients can avail small volume productions within extremely short periods.

By perfecting just-in-time manufacturing, Signicast is making costly inventory a thing of the past. The company precisely understands the customers’ requirements and thus delivers close-to-perfect components right when clients need them according to their production schedule. The firm’s extensive automation capability, combined with its proprietary technologies, facilitates clients with the best solutions needed to scale up their production, streamline their prototype testing, and enhance the quality of their components.

Elaborating on their client-friendly processes, Marc Riquelme mentions a case when Signicast worked with a client seeking to deploy a new product line into the market. The client had initially chosen Signicast as a medium-term solution provider for castings. For individual parts, the client had partnered with a local supplier that was machining out the components from solid aluminum. Since the client needed 40 different components, the lead time for those parts ranged from 10 to 12 weeks at the least. Noticing the scenario the client was in, Signicast proposed a better solution to help them avail the required parts in less than a month. The company kept to its promise and delivered the parts in record time, enabling the client to get the products to the market as quickly as possible.

Evolving with the Customer Requirements

Signicast has evolved continuously while addressing its clients’ prototyping requirements over the years. With dedicated sales and technical staff in multiple facilities across the U.S. and Europe, the company caters to an ever-increasing client base. Notably, the engineers and metallurgists at Signicast possess extensive knowledge and expertise and guide the clients throughout their prototyping process. When needed, Signicast offers the capability to combine several machined parts into a single component so as to reduce assembly time while simplifying the production.

Owing to its effectiveness in addressing client problems, Signicast has been able to expand its services beyond the industrial manufacturing space. Today, the company caters to customers from a variety of sectors, including defense and aerospace, medical equipment and devices, recreational vehicles, fluid technologies, mining and oilfield, firearms, power and hand tools, among many others.

Moving ahead at this rapid pace, the company will continue investing in new technologies that can benefit its clients, especially in terms of additive manufacturing. Signicast is working with new partners to introduce better prototyping processes into the market. The company is also planning to develop a ‘Digital Foundry,’ which will take Signicast beyond prototyping and help establish its foothold in the medium volume production landscape. In the near future, Signicast will introduce innovative and robust capabilities into the prototyping paradigm, making manufacturing simpler and quicker.