Through their newly established Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Program, the DLA has selected buyCASTINGS' FOPAT program for funding a Phase I program to develop low cost and short lead time tooling for investment casting patterns.

The DLA is responsible for providing parts to maintain military operations. These parts include many castings and machined castings and some of the parts were originally manufactured 50 years ago. This results in a problem of finding the original manufacturer and the tooling. The tooling may have been moved to another manufacturer or just completely lost or misplaced. The parts are typically low run quantities and tooling is a significant portion of the overall cost and time to get replacement parts.

buyCASTINGS working with FOPAT LLC have developed a new multicomponent foam casting pattern for investment casting. This material can be injected into traditional aluminum tooling but has shown promise with injection into alternate molding materials. The DLA funded phase I program will look at a few of the potential tooling materials. They are wood, Ren board, Stereolithography(SLA) and silicon rubber molds. Since the FOPAT material is injected into the molds with low pressure and temperature and does not need to be cooled to extract heat from the tool, these tooling materials may be cost effective as well as reduce the tooling lead-time.

The three parts that will be evaluated during the program, which runs thru May 2008, with a possible follow on after that, are a machine gun turret bracket for HumVee's and MRAP's, an aerospace support structure and a cast duplex stainless steel hinge for the latest MRAP vehicle.

The program manager is Mr. Dan Gearing for the DLA headquarters in Ft Belvoir, VA. buyCASTINGS has teamed up on this program with FOPAT LLC, with Mr. Raymond Monroe from the Steel Founders Society of America SFSA (www.sfsa.org) and NexTec of Springfield, OH.