Manufacturing techniques — General

Foundry may appear to be a very simple, universally known manufacturing technique, used for millennia and which consists of "melting an alloy and pouring it into a mold reproducing the shape of the part to be obtained". The industrial process is far more complex; It involves the manufacture of parts to well-defined criteria, with rigorous specifications, in a wide range of different alloys which are required to deliver increasingly high and reliable performance, in mass ranges from a few grams to several tens or hundreds of tons, with ever-tighter dimensional precision, the best possible surface finish, complex shapes to integrate the maximum number of functions, and with production rates ranging from a single part to several thousand parts a day under the most economical conditions possible.

The foundry has been able to meet all these sometimes contradictory requirements by modernizing its production techniques, developing new alloys and new manufacturing processes thanks to a more scientific and precise knowledge of the techniques and phenomena involved, and by developing and applying, at all stages of manufacturing, more efficient and rigorous control methods to improve the quality and reliability of the parts produced, particularly in the field of safety parts.