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MALAYSIAN iron and steel foundry industry has been in existence since the era of booming tin mining activities. The foundries comprised mostly of small- to medium-sized operators serving largely the lucrative components needs of the open cast mines.
The industry then lacked product diversification and hardly evolved in the technology upgrades.
The collapse of the tin mining sector in the early 1980s resulted in many of the smaller foundries to ceasing operations, while the medium-sized operators managed to switch operations to produce other products required by industries such as palm oil, quarry, water, railway, cement and some ship repairing or maintenance components.
Products such as mining dredge buckets and crushers are among those produced by the larger foundries and still remain in operation until today.
Most of the medium-sized foundries then were only able to produce components on small order quantities, limiting them from supporting the casting components required by the automotive manufacturing localisation venture mooted in the early 1980s.
In addition, the complexity in the casting of automotive components raised doubts on the ability of the surviving local foundries to participate in the automotive supply chain, especially the volume components demand with high-quality castings and safety standard requirements.
There were few modern foundries established towards late 1990s and early 2000s. These foundries are better organised and equipped with modern facilities that produce quality iron and steel castings in small and medium sizes.
The National Automotive Policy 2014 (NAP 2014) stresses on the importance of iron and steel foundry to support the development of automotive industry, particularly in the supply of large castings for mould bases and dies sets.
The lack of large foundries specialising in the production of high-quality automotive grade iron and steel large castings for mould and dies fabrication, has resulted in the local automotive players outsourcing these tools components overseas.
The practice to a certain extent rendered local parts manufacturing less competitive cost-wise and model facelift exercises rather expensive.
Non-ferrous parts, in particular that of the aluminium die-casting hardware items, have been produced locally for some time and the experiences have become useful to some die-casting ventures established to produce aluminium parts and components for the local automotive industry.
The lack of local ability to design and fabricate die-casting dies for gravity, low pressure and high pressure die-casting processes, still pose problems for the local die-casting industry to remain competitive, having to depend on foreign tool makers for the supply of their dies requirement.
In this respect, NAP 2014 has included in the development priorities to enhance the die-casting industry, with more attention to be given towards developing local die-casting and die-making.
The initiative is important in the drive to manufacture energy-efficient vehicles locally, where parts and components from aluminium will largely be used to reduce vehicle weight.
Most of the local foundries and die-casters employ composition analysis equipment such as
the spectrometer to determine
the alloying composition in their casted parts, thus meeting customers’ specifications.
However, the metallurgical analysis of the alloys is less practised by most of these foundries and die-casters.
Although composition analysis results may indicate compliance with customers’ specifications, little microstructural analysis and X-ray examinations are done on castings.
The desired properties of materials do not solely depend on their alloying composition, but the final morphology of the cast structure too constitutes the quality of the final products.
This is more important when the cast parts are subjected to heat treatment processes after sand-casting or die-casting.
As a result, more involvement of metallurgies and materials engineers on the foundries and die-caster shop-floor operations are crucial.
壓鑄展-鑄造展-2015第十六屆廣州國際壓鑄、鑄造及工業爐展覽會-中國最受關注的壓鑄鑄造展會-巨浪展覽-The 16th
Guangzhou Die-casting, Foundry & Industry Furnace Exhibition
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