Kirsh Foundry – Background
Kirsh Foundry is a third-generation, family-owned iron-casting foundry founded in 1939 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Kirsh Foundry creates cast iron casings for a wide variety of customers. The company has grown significantly, now four times its size in 1980, and has claimed its place as an industry leader.
The Challenge
Kirsh wanted to automate more of the work done in the foundry, especially for casting handling. Manually handling and cooling castings is slower and comes with potential safety hazards. Everything was moved manually, resulting in long waits for the castings to cool. Kirsh has used General Kinematics equipment in the past, with some GK conveyors at Kirsh being over 30 years old. So the Kirsh team reached out to GK’s foundry experts to work out a solution to streamline the casting handling and cooling process.
The Solution
Because Kirsh wanted to streamline and automate the casting handling and cooling process, they needed to improve material-handling solutions to cool the product and avoid damage. General Kinematics suggested a casting cooling conveyor, but needed to supply the solution in the limited space available. GK’s sales team provided a solution that fit within the foundry’s footprint, custom-building the equipment without sacrificing the customer’s goals.
Results
While the GK team worked to design their new system, the Kirsh team immediately began preparing the area for installation. The foundry floor was restructured to streamline casting, cooling, and processing operations. Finishing, dressing, cleaning, and grinding are now being done in a smooth, linear fashion.
The new system cools castings more efficiently. Before installation, the casting and gating cluster was removed to a tub for cooling, then removed again for degating before being returned to a tub to await blasting. The time between molding and shipping would be between 10 and 12 days. Now, castings are sent to grinders and finishers within a day.
“It’s the smoothest that it’s been in my lifetime here. We look for three things: safety gains, productivity gains, or environmental gains. And this project satisfied all three. It’s made a huge difference, and it’s actually… from my point of view, the last piece of the puzzle in getting this foundry from a manually run 190 people, down to the group of people we have today. We’re down to about 80 employees, and it’s much more efficient and a much better place to work.”
– Jim Kirsh, CEO of Kirsh Foundry.
