A preventive maintenance schedule is not a document you file away. It is a habit you build. In my 25 years, I have seen foundries with 20-year-old furnaces that run like new, and foundries with 5-year-old furnaces that break down every month. The diffe...

In early 2024, I received a call from a foundry manager in Guangdong Province. His plant supplies aluminium die castings to several automotive OEMs in China and Southeast Asia. Their main product is a structural component for electric vehicles — a moto...

In late 2023, I was contacted by a die casting plant in Rayong, Thailand. They supply structural components for electric vehicles — battery trays, motor housings, and front shock towers. Their main customer is a Chinese OEM that has invested heavily in...

In mid-2023, I received a call from a foundry manager in Malaysia. His voice was tense. “Our 3-tonne gas-fired reverb furnace is failing. The lining cracked after only 14 months. We have patches everywhere. The shell is getting hot. We need h...

In early 2023, a mid-sized foundry in Jiangsu Province contacted me. They run two gas-fired reverberatory furnaces, each with a 5-tonne capacity. They melt around 25 tonnes per day of ADC12 and A380 for automotive and industrial castings. Their energy ...

In late 2022, I received an email from a foundry manager in Indiana, USA. He had found my blog through a search for “aluminium furnace maintenance checklist.” His message was short: “Our maintenance costs are out of control. We run two gas-fired reverb...

In early 2023, I received a call from a die casting plant in Shanghai. They were running two gas-fired reverberatory furnaces, each with a capacity of 3 tonnes. They melted around 18 tonnes per day of ADC12 alloy. Their energy bill had risen ...

The electric vehicle has changed the die casting furnace more in five years than the internal combustion engine did in fifty. That is not an exaggeration. When Tesla introduced the first “gigacast” rear underbody in 2019, it set off a chain reaction th...

China’s aerospace aluminium industry is at a crossroads. The demand has never been stronger. The technology has never been closer. But the gap between what China can produce and what its aerospace programmes actually need remains wider than most people...

China’s secondary aluminium industry is the largest in the world. It is also the most misunderstood. From the outside, it looks like a story of unstoppable growth. From the inside, it is a story of structural contradiction — rapid capacity ex...