continuously evolved into requiring more intricate parts. Instead of a plain airfoil, it might have slots and ribs and lots of holes, and then have thin sections con- nected to thick sections by very little con- necting material; and then the demands of DS/single crystal to have stability... so the net result is getting more intricate all the time. And prices went up because you had a lot more work to do and a lot lower yield. The market was expanding, and there were very few players because it was a very limited market in total.” Uram noted that while ceramic cores are more complex today, the same basic process is used for their manufacture. “We have one process and it’s the same from day one as it is today, except quality control and refinements, and how you do it have improved greatly,” he said. “But I always took a lot of pride in the fact that we made them by injec- tion molding a mixture of wax and plas- tic and ceramic material, and we made
giant cores and little cores all the same way.
The competition often had three or
four different processes going at the same time,and
that gives you monumental
problems regarding where you put your technical resources.” As Uram approached retirement age, he thought about selling out, backed out, and finally made a move a few years later. “I think a lot of entrepreneurs won-
der what their business is worth and when they should sell. My children had no in- terest in it, so it wasn’t going to happen that way. But I got older and it seemed like the right time.
“Regarding future industry challeng- es, Uram indicated that while he had gone the route of producing larger and larger parts, the world seems to be entering an “age of miniaturization.” “We seem to be in an age where everybody wants smaller, lighter, more intricate.”
He views the industry‘s future much as he did his own when he chose his ca- reer path. “The world is full of surprises, he concluded. “There could be some guy de- veloping a wild metallurgical process as we speak which could replace a method for making investment casting– vapor or spray metal or who knows what– a lot of things have been tried over the years. But there is always a right time for ev- erything.
*** EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in
a series of features based on inter- views of industry pioneers conducted in an effort to collect a history of the North American investment casting industry. Stuart Uram is founder of Certech, Inc. and a long-time partici- pant in the Investment Casting Insti- tute.
Uram Offers “Snapshot” of Investment Casting Institute 50 Years Ago
When Certech Founder Stuart Uram entered the in- vestment casting industry in 1960, the Investment Cast- ing Institute was a relatively new organization. The Insti- tute he remembers from 50 years ago was a collection of entrepreneurs with little foundry knowledge, but a great deal of determination, and a way of learning from each other.
His remembrances, col-
lected by the Institute in an effort to capture the history of the investment casting in North America, provides a “snapshot” of the Institute half a century ago. “It was interesting to
me that they weren’t found- February 2012 83
ry people. Everybody in the investment
casting industry
was from a machine shop, or a tool making shop or some- thing like that,” he said. “When I joined Hitchiner
in 1960, the investment-cast- ing institute was pretty small, pretty young. Here I was, this fresh graduate with my doc- torate degree, and I was like two weeks on the job and they sent me to Alford for a week with all these investment cast- ers. I remember being totally amazed, number one, most of these guys didn’t have a col- lege degree. They didn’t un- derstand anything about how to feed a casting and so on. And there were a lot of mom
and pop shops. A lot of these foundries didn’t have a metal- lurgist and didn’t have many professional
people in the
engineering world at all,” he added.
“I would have thought
they would have come out of the foundry industry. But the foundry guys had blinders on, ‘we make sand castings, we make dye castings, what is this investment casting stuff?’ So these machine shop guys and other types, they caught on that this was a process they could use for something in- dustrial.” “I’ll tell you another sto-
ry,” Uram continued, “If my memory is true, I went to an
Institute meeting once and a guy from Oregon showed up with a basketball-sized casting that they said was poured and vacuum melted out. And we looked at this thing like ‘I don’t believe this!’ That sized part in in- vestment casting? We were making sewing machine parts and we all laughed, we thought ‘this guy is some- thing else he isn’t for real.’ Well you may have heard of the company called Pre- cision Cast Parts and they didn’t even have a vacuum furnace– but we were all kind of skeptical that you could really do this sort of thing.”
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