In August 2022, just two short years ago, Carl Panzenhagen, CEO of Blast Cleaning Technologies, along with a team of foundry experts, took the next step of vertically integrating critical components and processes into BCT. In 2018, the relocation to a larger 130,000 sq ft facility and the integration of all fabrication and machining requirements resulted in substantial growth, new customers and innovations that have propelled BCT into a North American leader. BCT’s latest move, a New Generation Foundry designed solely to produce castings for the shot blast process, continues this critical vertical integration process.

Several factors played into this decision; the most important factor was to ensure that BCT would meet customer requirements for spare parts. The impact of Covid on castings suppliers was particularly challenging. As early as May 2020, US manufacturers began desperately working to reshore castings back from overseas to meet their production requirements. 

This focus on reshoring provided US casting producers with enough additional work that much of the open capacity, especially for the custom alloy castings required for shotblasting, was filled. Coupled with a labour market that tightened over the past several years, foundries, like most businesses, struggled with demand. 

Other critical factors that led BCT to move forward were quality, cost, and ensuring availability. The ability to innovate with new alloys & heat treatments that provide extended wear life, improved toughness and casting fit-up are all focused strategies for our new facility.

BCT made the decision to move forward and in October of 2022 acquired a machining facility in West Allis, Wisconsin that had been permanently closed. We performed a complete facility facelift and modernized it to create a world-class facility and operation. 

Our goal was to design a foundry to produce state-of-the-art quality castings, utilizing the best technology and automation available, coupled with environmentally friendly processes that would allow us to drive change in the shot blasting industry. The final piece was to utilize innovation to create better wear products that last longer and are more predictable. 

One of BCT’s unique capabilities as an organization is to work with manufacturers’ processes in and around their shot blasting operations. This includes foundries, forges and almost every type of manufacturing process that uses blast cleaning equipment. Our team is extremely capable of designing, integrating and building complementary systems that feed our blast systems, so we have taken on the design and build of much of the foundry and equipment in-house. The entire facility was designed by BCT engineering, and 70% of the equipment was built in-house by our team!

BCT Cast Products operates two different production casting lines capable of producing over 8,000,000 lbs of shotblast parts annually at maximum capacity, although production in 2025 will be just over 1,000,000 lbs of shotblast castings:  

Our ceramic media no-bake moulding line provides us with high production rates in excess of 25 moulds per hour and very high levels of quality due to the improved thermal properties of ceramic media versus traditional sand media. This improves casting finish, allows for tighter tolerances and, for some alloys, even improves the microstructure of the casting by cooling it faster in the mould.  The ceramic media is also silica-free, eliminating a serious health hazard to our employees. These benefits come at a substantial cost; ceramic media is 40 times more expensive than traditional sand media, which is why we’ve installed a thermal reclamation system that allows us to recycle 100% of the ceramic media continuously.

The Investment Casting, or ‘Lost Wax’ moulding cell, manufacturers our precision TwistLOK™ e-Wheel™ components. This process provides a ‘near-machined’ type tolerance for improved fit-up and balance. Components such as blades, control cages, impellers and housing components are cast with this precision process. Even our bare e-Wheel™ is cast with this process, the only shotblast wheel ‘cast’ for production that we are aware of. This casting process allows BCT to provide extremely high quality replacement parts at reduced costs. 

The process begins with a wax impression which is ‘wax-welded’ to a sprue bar and then coated with a slurry via a robotic handling system. The mould clusters, anywhere from 2 to 20 castings each, move through a fully automated continuous drying and coating cell via robotic transfers. After several coats of slurry and drying cycles, the wax is melted from the shells, the shells are heated to 1800F, and metal is poured into the shell, resulting in a casting that is far more precise than traditional moulding methods.

Casting finishing is done using several BCT blast systems. The No-Bake system primarily utilises a BCT 70” Table with indexing capability for operator loading and unloading. Fast, simple and very ergonomic, this blast provides an initial cleaning of the castings, gating / runner system in less than 2 minutes. All gates and runners are returned for remelting and by blasting this material first, the furnace and the environment are improved substantially.

Final blasting of castings from the no-bake line can be done on the table or for smaller, more delicate parts like blades, in our BCT 6 cubic foot rubber belt tumble blast.

The investment castings are cleaned in an upgraded BCT 2460 Spinner, outfitted with our high efficiency Magnetic Separation system designed specifically for the separation of shot and non-metallics like sand or the ceramics used in coating the investment mould cluster. BCT’s magnetic separation system allows us to clean mould clusters in a complete ‘shell-removal’ state, which is also used by several of our aerospace customers. With this process, we eliminate all manual or water blast shell removal processes and achieve complete shell removal in a compact, low cost, minimal maintenance system.

With our 100% focus on shotblast castings, we have been able to design our casting finishing department to maximise automation.  Within our first year of operation, 80% of all our casting volume will be finished in several fully automated robotic grinding cells. The cells include passive pressure readback and vision cameras that qualify each casting. Manual casting finishing is a challenging task, one that will still be required for some of our castings, especially those in lower volumes. To provide our finishing operators with the best possible working environment, we have provided a separate air-conditioned finishing room in the plant.  

To prepare for running our own facility, we spent much of 2023 and the 1st half of 2024 building up inventories of castings with our current suppliers so that we could have the time to go through the growing pains of start-up.  Thankfully, these pains were limited to the first few months, and we are now running at the production levels required to keep spare part inventory levels up. With over 300 different castings and existing tooling coming in from multiple foundry vendors, we needed time to review the existing tooling and decide whether to use it as-is, modify it or to make new tooling. Maximising productivity and quality is ultimately the deciding factor in whether we build new tooling. As part of our continued vertical integration, we have added the capability to build all tooling in-house. Our tooling area includes a large 3D printer capable of handling up to 48” square, CNC router, CNC vertical and various wood working machines to enable us to build tooling for both no-bake and investment processes.

To complement our tooling capabilities, we have invested in a 3D scanner that provides a full 3D scan of any casting, along with the software to quickly convert the scanned data into a SolidWorks model and then quickly into a production drawing. In less than 24 hours after receiving a casting from a customer looking for assistance, we can scan it, start building tooling and potentially have castings back to them within a week. This would of course depend on the complexity and other factors like machining or heat treatment, but our goal is to be able to support customers who need shotblast parts quickly and with the highest level of quality.  

BCT is dedicated to ensuring that our customers have spare parts when they need them. We offer a vast knowledge of the shot blasting industry and are focused not only on supporting BCT equipment, but also supporting customers with other makes and models of shot blasting equipment, which makes up 30% of our production. We have the capabilities to support this offering with our extensive technical service and support team as well as high value -added castings for the shot blasting industry.

There is a strong demand for premium shot blast parts and BCT Cast Products offers reliable and quality castings. BCT has been focused on reinvestment in our facilities with investments from expanding our manufacturing capabilities and now our New Generation Foundry. There is a strong demand for premium shot blast parts and our BCT Cast Products division increases our ability to support shotblast customers who are struggling to get quality shot blast parts. BCT has been focused on the continued reinvestment in our facilities to expand our manufacturing capabilities.

For Information: 

Blast Cleaning Technologies

6682 W. Greenfield Ave., 

West Allis, WI 53214, USA

Tel. +1.262.785.7577

E-mail: sales@bct-us.com

www.bct-us.com