Opportunities are opening up to radically reduce the time it takes to produce large scale, highly accurate castings with a high quality surface finish that does not need machining.

Thanks to backing from the UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK, and the Aerospace Technology Institute, AMRC Castings has been able to significantly increase the size of replica patterns and moulds it can produce using CNC technology.

AMRC Castings is part of the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and is based on the Advanced Manufacturing Park at Catcliffe, near Sheffield.

The organisation develops new castings technologies and provides design and manufacturing consultancy services.

In the past, the maximum size of a single mould component AMRC Castings could make has been limited to 2600x1500x850 millimetres.

That has now been radically increased to 2600x4000x2000 millimetres, following the installation of a bespoke CMS Poseidon 5 axis CNC machine.

The specifications of the CMS Poseidon have been tailored to machining dimensionally accurate replicas from polystyrene which are coated in ceramic to create the moulds used in AMRC Castings' Replicast