Tour of Sivyer Steel Castings

I had the pleasure to tour Sivyer Steel in Bettendorf Iowa this morning. It’s a steel foundry that has been in operation at this location since 1962 and prior history in Milwaukee. Employs about 200+ people and pours steel casting up to 25,000 lbs.

https://www.sivyersteel.com/

Also, there were some photo restrictions, but I was able to get some photos of castings. I was asleep at the switch on a couple of the mold interiors. Here’s a smaller one and one have a mold wash applied.



….and the core department.



They operate three 10 Ton Arc Furnaces. Here’s one of them. They only pour on third shift because electrical costs are much lower so no unfortunately no pouring photos.



And here’s a set of electrodes for the furnaces.



There were several bays like this full of castings from previous shifts. Cooling time to demold can vary 1 to 5 days.



They pig off the remaining charge to these cups for remelt.



They have several acres of scrap steel they have segregated by alloy and a full in-house metallurgical capability with spectrometers and casting analysis including ultrasonic, mag particle, and XRay up to 14”.

They use all bound chromite sand (alpha-set binder). The composition of cores and core binders can vary. They manage to reclaim about 80% of it. Here’s a shot of one of the entry points to the reclamation system.



This pulverizes and delivers to an underground conveyor system shown here. That is a magnetic separator hovering over the belt and it gets thermally treated to drive out old binder.



Here are a few part photos. First, a planetary gear carrier undergoing mag particle prep.



The same part receiving a little welding rework from overzealous degating.



The same part rough machine for subsequent inspection steps. They do rough machine work in house but no finish machining.



There are a couple other castings for some large mining equipment. A pulverize and an idler. Check out all those cylindrical risers on the back of the idler wheel…….how would you like to remove those?



Here’s some degating in process. They use torch, gouging rods, and oxygen lances to remove risers 12”+ in diameter.



Additional finishing operations



They have several heat treating and aging ovens on the line



They have 13 heat treating ovens like this one.



Here’s the rest of them. That first station is a variable intensity quenching system that control the rate of quench. It uses water and has an extraction system overhead that condenses cools and reclaims the water.



Here’s a valve body and a bunch of castings awaiting shipment.



I glossed over a bunch but pretty cool to see an operation of that scale, especially one of the most demanding casting environments such as a steel foundry.

Best,
Kelly

 

They do some military work. Those parts cannot be photographed. Due to the typical confidentiality agreements, the parts I did photograph had to be something that was already in the public domain, basically visible on the equipment on which they are used or otherwise publicly displayed. The parts I photographed were at the relatively small end of their capability range.

I really wish I could have snapped a few photos of them packing molds. They had a large mixing machine with an arm that delivered/showered catalyzed sand directly to the mold. That was expected but the mold sat on a vibration table and he mention that vibration strictly in the vertical axis only was used to compact the sand. Now bear in mind, this stout steel flask was about 12' x 4' x 2', let alone the mass of the sand that was being placed. That vibe table would have been interesting to see in action. There was a very large jib crane for picking and placing the mold.

It was pretty loud and I was wearing ear plugs. I'm sure when I asked he said chromite and alpha set binder. However, that could have just been facing sand. When I looked at the reclamation staging area there were cores and mixed varieties. They may have segregated the cores or perhaps recycled sand is only used in the bulk of the mold......dunno. I suspect achieving 80% reclamation was aspirational ;-)

I didn't see any pours but I saw the ladles and a lot of poured molds. Based upon that, yes, I'd say open air pours. I asked about pour times but the reply was "it widely varies". I was expecting some very long times. I was sonly able to see the gating on a few different parts.

I didn't see a crane in the heat treat furnace. They had slide out floors. There were a number of gantry and jib cranes over a good percentage of the factory floor work area. Nothing moves manually in this place.

The photos are mining equipment parts.....except the valve body.

Best,
Kelly