at the agriculture equipment company when his boss tasked him with fixing a problematic component for its farm field harrow machine. The fabrica- tion was too costly, too dimension- ally inconsistent and took too much time to produce. Would a casting sow savings for Besler? Hammond invited Smith Foundry, Minneapolis, which produces other castings for Besler, to work with him to design a single-piece component. Un- initiated in designing a part for casting, Hammond received a crash course on the


D May/June 2011


wayne Hammond was a newbie at Besler In- dustries Inc., Cambridge, Neb. He had just logged two weeks as draftsman


process’s capabilities and constraints. “I had not worked with casting


before,” he said. “So we worked back and forth to get our draft angles and parting lines right.” The problem part was a steel fab-


rication consisting of three flat pieces with two bends and a hole punched in each. The three pieces were welded together. Each fabrication required five minutes of welding. The component clamped onto long tubes of a harrow, which drags spikes over sod to break it up for better seeding. Each tube has two clamps, each harrow can have between three or four tubes, and a piece of Besler machinery can have up to four sections of harrows—a total of 40 clamps. Hammond calculated each


weldment was costing the company $12-15 to make. “It was a fairly expensive piece for


us to make, and it didn’t really look that great,” Hammond said. “It worked, but it wasn’t clean and neat.”


Parting Line Position Hammond consulted with Smith


Foundry on material choice since the part would be converted from A36 mild steel to ductile iron. “They told us the grade of steel


they were using, and we conferenced with our metallurgist to come up with the cast product that met the physical properties of that grade of steel,” said Jim Pint, sales manager for Smith Foundry.


Metal Casting Design anD PurChasing 33


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