I was browsing antique type foundry equipment and came across literature for Hines and Adams Foundy flasks and many were 'springable' and tapered. Was there an advantage to this? I have been known to ram a drag upside down and then be SOL on the cope.... Thanks!
Those are called snap flasks, this type of flask can be removed from the mold before pouring, in a commercial setting they allow a single flask to prepare multiple molds. As a teenager, my brother spent part of one summer working in a foundry, it was common practice in that foundry for the molding crews to make many molds during their shift and at end of their shift, a pouring crew would come in and fill all the molds. With snap flasks, this is possible without having to have a large number of flasks on site.
I've seen non-tapered snap flasks, but I think one advantage of the taper is being able to drop one of these jackets over the exposed sand mold: Jeff
That flask is an Adams , looks like a 5 over 5 ...the flask to the right is a Freemont, looks like a 5 over 4. Both are called snaps, but Freemont bills it as spread-loc. Hines production flasks are called pop-offs, not to be confused with an ease gate. These are production flasks. I knew some iron molders in Okla City (Enterprise Foundry) that put up 200-235 molds a day running Freemont 14x19 5/5 ...those guys were good. Best I ever got was 198 in 8 hours. Over all scrape <5%. didn't get bonus if you over 5%
BTW....when we get a new man in the shop, flipping his cope, just the cope, makes for an interesting show.
After reading this and Patrick's Osborn thread, I binged me some YouTube videos on molding machines, from the small Cringle Engineering one all the way us to setups where they had large jolt/squeeze machines and even went so far as only doing drags on one machine and copes on the other and combining them in the middle. Also saw the people stripping off the tapered flasks and stacking the completed molds on a cart waiting to be poured.
Jolt/squeeze machines have been made now for something like 80 years. For their niche I don't believe there is a better design out there. I ran a 10x17 4 over 3 flask on one and got 35 molds in a half hour...love jobs like that. Those parts were wrenches for firefighters. 2 on matchplate.
