Articles: Industry News

AFS Corporate Member Alpha Resources LLC, Stevensville, Michigan, an aftermarket supplier of consumables and reference materials, has added supplies for Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) analysis to its product line. In-stock OES supplies include: electrodes, syringes, o-rings, filters, vacuum pumps, and more. 

Alpha’s new OES products are compatible with OES analysis equipment from OEMs such as Thermo Fisher Scientific and Bruker. The high-quality lab supplies are compatible for aftermarket use in the specified analyzers. 

The Brynavon Group has acquired AFS Corporate Member Effort Foundry, Inc. in Bath, Pennsylvania. Effort Foundry, Inc. has been in business since 1971 and produces castings for pumps, valves, power generation, and general industrial application in a wide variety of alloys including steel, stainless, ni-based, ductile iron, and gray iron.

Rio Tinto is investing $29 million to build a new aluminum recycling facility at its Arvida plant in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, to expand its offering of low-carbon aluminum solutions for customers in the automotive, packaging and construction markets. 

 The facility will make Rio Tinto the first primary aluminum producer in North America to incorporate recycled post-consumer aluminum into aluminum alloys. 

AFS Corporate Member Craft Pattern & Mold is now running casting process simulation software from EKK. EKKcapcast is a powerful, finite element tool that analyzes both mold flow and solidification behavior of ferrous and non-ferrous alloys. 

On September 9, Fort Wayne, Indiana-based MetalX completed the transaction to acquire the assets and business of secondary aluminum melter SRT Aluminum in Wabash, Indiana, now operating as MetalX Aluminum Conversion LLC (MAC).

David Currence has been named plant manager of MAC and will be responsible for leading the company’s efforts to refine operating performance and increase capacity. Joe Rosengarten, former SRT chief operating officer, joins the MetalX commercial team as a vice president. More than 120 SRT employees have been retained by MAC.  

Missiles aren’t the only thing flying through the air in Ukraine. So says the CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry (WAF), Sachin Shivaram, whose employees in the company’s Consumer Products division worked around the clock this summer to build thousands of medical sterilizers to be emergency air-freighted to Ukraine by UNICEF. UNICEF placed an order for over 3,000 of the sterilizer units, which are like pressure cookers and offer an economical solution for large-volume sterilization.

Sinto America and Purdue University have finalized plans for integrating a Smart Foundry for Purdue’s “Smart Manufacturing” curriculum.  The Smart Foundry classroom, comprising a fully functioning, production-capable, green sand foundry, will be located on the ground level of the new “Gateway” building in the heart Purdue’s campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. It will be a standalone metals processing laboratory fully integrated with the “Sinto Smart Foundry” solutions. 

Retirees joined with current employees of AFS Corporate Member Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry (WAF) to break ground on a new 55,000 square-foot expansion project at the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, foundry during a retiree/employee recognition and appreciation event on September 1. The new $20 million addition will create 80 new jobs and accelerate WAF’s growth in key target markets such as electric vehicles, medical equipment, and consumer products. The facility will be operational in the summer of 2023.

AFS Corporate Member Buck Co. Inc., in conjunction with its parent company, The Dixon Group, has acquired Richmond Foundry LLC, a 50-year-old AFS Corporate member in Dayton, New Jersey, that produces high-quality brass and bronze sand castings. Richmond’s 40,000-sq.-ft. facility adds capacity and capabilities that will benefit both companies’ customers. 

Dee Manufacturing, an affiliate of AFS Corporate Member Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, is one of five companies to receive funding from the Minnesota Job Creation Fund and the Minnesota Investment Fund, according to an announcement August 18 from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Located in Crookston, Dee Manufacturing has been awarded $175,000, which will go toward facility expansion that’s expected to create 30 jobs in the next three years, with an average wage of $19.40 an hour.