Spent a whole shift chasing a chill in a ductile pour

We had a big ductile iron job with a new sand mix, and a chill kept forming in the same corner of the casting, right near the gate. I figured it was a quick temp fix, maybe twenty minutes. Ended up taking me and the furnace guy over four hours to sort it out, trying different pouring speeds and riser sizes. Turns out the sand was pulling heat way faster than our old blend. Anyone else run into this with newer, 'high-performance' sands?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan_mitchell6d ago

Four hours on a single chill is brutal. That new sand mix must have been pulling heat like crazy. Sounds like a real headache of a shift.

blairc906d ago

Honestly, four hours seems like a stretch. I've seen chills act up but never for a full half shift. Maybe the guy was stuck babysitting it while they sorted something else, you know how stories get told later. It's probably more about the whole system being off that day, not just one piece of sand.

bennett.harper6d ago

Yeah, chasing a chill for four hours is a special kind of shift. It reminds me of when we switched to a different coating on our cores. Everything looked perfect on paper, better shake-out and all that, but it started creating this cold shut issue we never had before. We spent days just adding more heat to the metal, which threw off the whole cycle time before we realized the coating itself was the sink.