Die Casting Material

The Choice Die Casting Material

If you go to Google’s image search service and search for “die cast aluminum,” you’ll see a wide range of products. There’s a good reason for this: aluminum is an excellent material choice when it comes to metal casting. Aluminum is versatile, comparatively inexpensive and features a wide range of favorable physical qualities. It’s light-weight, easily cast and resists corrosion. Corrosion resistance is an especially important physical quality when it comes to forming metals with heat, because heat can facilitate oxidation in metals with poor corrosion resistance.

Aluminum can be chosen to be the construction material for an extensive variety of products; you can see the evidence of that if you visit the website I mentioned in the first paragraph. The irony of aluminum’s prominence today as a choice casting material is that while it’s valued for its economy today, it was once valued for its rarity in not-so-distant history. It used to be that bauxite, the ore in which aluminum most frequently occurs naturally, was very difficult to work with. Methods of extracting aluminum from bauxite on an industrial scale weren’t developed until relatively recently. Before that point, aluminum was valued as a rare, precious metal, and it was reported to have been used to make silverware that was given to only the most honored guests of important historical figures.

Today, of course, aluminum is abundant. We use it for all sorts of purposes. But that shouldn’t diminish the value of aluminum. Today, aluminum is valued not because of its rarity but because of its abundance and versatility. It can be used for the construction of gearboxes, gaskets, all kinds of hardware, machine components and a variety of other products that’s so large it wouldn’t fit into a single volume. Aluminum die castings are valuable because of their economy and performance; they are key ingredients in a large variety of industrial processes and products.