In modern metalcasting, steel and aluminum are two contenders for the top material of choice. Thousands of manufacturers around the world rely on both metals to produce strong, light and corrosion-resistant metal parts and products.

You'll find hundreds of different grades and alloys for both steel and aluminum, and each has its specific advantages and disadvantages. For this comparison, we'll focus on differences between aluminum and steel alloys in general, rather than zooming in on differences between specific alloys.

Manufacturing doesn't work without people. Equipment operators, engineers, sales teams and managerial staff are responsible for the success of every manufacturing business. Just like there's no company without people, there's no healthy business without healthy employees.

With healthcare costs constantly on the rise, employee healthcare is a major expense for businesses of all sizes. Traditionally, companies have a limited scope of choices to make when it comes to healthcare. Most choose to either subsidize health insurance for their employees, or form a self-funded insurance group.

A third option, which is increasingly gaining popularity, is to host onsite health clinics. These clinics can offer easier access to healthcare and more control over healthcare costs–but onsite clinics aren't right for every business. Here, we explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of hosting onsite clinics.

Eagle Precision Cast Parts, Inc. just released a downloadable resource, titled Investment Casting Process Guide: A Comprehensive Introduction to Investment Casting.

The goal of the 21-page ebook is to make it easy for manufacturers, and anyone else who's interested, to learn the basics of investment casting. Manufacturers looking for a better way to produce parts can find information on tolerances, design recommendations and a full case study.

Whether you're bringing a new product to market, improving on an old design or entering the world of metal manufacturing for the first time, you'll need to find the right foundry for the job. Choosing a metal casting supplier can be a daunting task, and not everyone makes the right choice the first time.

These five mistakes companies make when choosing a new metal casting supplier can lead to expensive fixes, defective products, overpriced castings, logistical headaches and customer service nightmares. Read on to find out what NOT to do when choosing a new foundry.

CNC Machining is often the last step in metal manufacturing, or sometimes the only process involved. Compared to other metalworking techniques, CNC machining is capable of meeting the tightest tolerances, and producing the most accurate, precise products over and over again.

Eagle Alloy, Inc. was founded in 1979 and quickly grew from a short-run facility to a medium-to-high-production steel foundry. Despite the company’s success, its founders were not satisfied with the status quo. Having heard of developments in lean manufacturing, they decided to implement these tools in hopes of achieving greater efficiency, stability and quality throughout the production process.

5S: The Beginning

As with many production facilities beginning to experiment with lean manufacturing, Eagle Alloy started with 5S. 5S is easy to adapt to just about any environment, and the key to lean is customization. Every lean tool must be adapted to the particular type of production, to the size of the company and to the facility's space.

Aluminum can be shaped through a wide variety of process, including:

• Casting
• Extrusion
• Forging
• Rolling

For any type of metal, casting is arguably the most versatile of all of the forming processes, and results in the greatest variety of parts. In fact, the US Department of Energy estimates that over 90% of all manufactured goods contain metal cast products.

The same casting techniques used for other metals can be applied to aluminum, but some of the most popular methods used with aluminum are permanent mold casting, greensand casting and die casting.

Two Eagle Group companies, Eagle Alloy, Inc., and Eagle CNC Technologies, Inc., have posted a series of personal bests and significant improvements across the board.

As you can see below, Eagle Alloy's achievements in 2017 include:

• 96.4% delivery – 2nd best in company history
• 1.87% scrap – BEST in company history
• 2.64% returns – Best in last 10 years
• 97.4% audit score – Best in last 8 years
• .27 PPM resulting in complaints – BEST in company history

Coordinate Measuring Machines, known more often as CMMs, are a staple of industrial metrology. Of the thousands of variations of CMMs, you're likely to encounter at least one version in every manufacturing quality control department. You might not recognize it at first because CMMs can look like, well, pretty much anything–but in any form, these hard-working machines allow manufacturers to accurately measure a long list of product characteristics.

Sure, manufacturers could still measure their products the old fashioned way–with a good set of calipers and a lot of trigonometry–but in today's competitive environment, we need to take measurements in minutes, not days. We also require superior accuracy, sometimes down to .00005".

Eagle Aluminum Cast Products, Inc. recently published an ebook offering insight into manufacturing with aluminum.

Manufacturing with Aluminum: History, Forming Techniques and Best Practices draws on decades of experience, taking a holistic approach to aluminum manufacturing. Weighing in at just under 25 illustrated pages, the ebook aims to fill a gap between online resources and textbooks. According to Jim Smith, Technical Manager at Eagle Aluminum, “We want to make sure anyone curious about aluminum can get all the basic information they need, without searching all over the Internet or going back to school.”