The Experimental Foundry at CMRDI: A short History of Excellency
Over more than 35 years, CMRDI exerted extensive efforts in the 80’s of the past century to establish an experimental foundry of about 700 t/year capacity with modern melting, molding, sand preparation, core-making heat treatment, as well as machining facilities. The foundry has never been a competitor of the local commercial foundries, instead its production is concentrated around castings required in limited quantities that normally need a short R & D program to reach the required specifications before production. The produced castings are usually import replacements with the same quality levels. Two distinct main privileges of the foundry are:
· It is backed by 40 years experience of alloy development programs at the different departments of CMRDI, which renders the quality of the produced castings very often superior to that of the imported ones.
· Moreover, the foundry is supported by the extensive up-to-date testing, characterization as well as quality control facilities at CMRDI that can hardly be found in any commercial foundry.
The experimental foundry at CMRDI has been also playing a prominent role in localization of spare parts production in Egypt. Over many years of continuous development, the activities at that foundry have been following different tracks: production of finished castings for the market, developing and transferring production technologies to the Egyptian foundry industry and designing and conducting of tailored training courses on both the theoretical and practical scales for the Egyptian foundrymen as well as their colleagues from Arab and African Countries.