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Serious question, is anyone still using straight silica sand for facing molds?
I keep seeing guys at our shop in Toledo use plain silica sand for the facing layer on big steel castings. They say it's cheap and works fine. But every time we do, we get more surface defects and spend twice as long on grinding. I switched to a zircon blend last year and our scrap rate on those jobs dropped by almost 15 percent. Are we just stuck in old habits, or is there a real reason to stick with the basic sand?
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hill.jade2mo agoMost Upvoted
Ugh, that's so frustrating. The numbers don't lie, and your scrap rate proves it. Old habits are just really hard to kill in this trade.
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rivera.christopher2mo ago
Tell me about it, @hill.jade. We tracked our scrap for a month and the data was brutal. It always points back to those little shortcuts people learned years ago, like skipping a calibration step because "it's always fine." Changing that muscle memory is the real battle.
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