Case Study: RLM Industries achieves production-ready investment castings in one week with Stratasys FDM

FDM Tooling Helps Foundry Produce Quality Investment Castings in Only a Week

RLM Industries, a leading supplier of investment castings to defense, construction, food handling and automotive customers, faced a critical delivery risk when a foundry couldn’t produce gear-set castings that met drawing specifications for a military customer. Rather than the two-month, $5,000–$20,000 injection-mold pattern route, RLM turned to Stratasys Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) to produce ABS investment-casting patterns and accelerate design review and approvals.

Using Stratasys FDM equipment, RLM revised the CAD model, printed patterns in under a day and produced approved castings in seven days; patterns cost roughly $1,250 and typical lead time to cast parts was one week. The Stratasys-enabled workflow delivered perfectly matching gear-set castings used in a test launch, cut lead time by about seven weeks (≈88%) and reduced pattern costs by 75–94%, while allowing confidence to proceed to hard-tooling for production.

RLM Industries

Rick Meachum

Vice President of Sales