Die casting has a well-established reputation as an efficient, economical process that offers designers a variety of advantages for creating parts and components. These benefits often make die casting the obvious choice when selecting a manufacturing process for a particular part. However, sometimes designers must weigh the advantages of die casting against other processes, such as plastic injection molding.

Manufacturers seeking a competitive edge in today’s global economy are increasingly turning to rapid prototyping to bring products faster to market. As part of the rapid prototyping process, die casters are using a variety of rapid tooling methods to produce pre-production models, limited runs of production parts and even production quality tools capable of running up to 100,000 parts in some circumstances.

North American die casters consistently strive to expand applications for die cast products, increase the efficiency of the process or create materials that improve the performance of the finished product. A key element in this quest is the development of specialty alloys that solve a particular problem.

The price of metal used to create components is one of the significant production costs in any die casting operation, and it is one of the costs that can be subject to tremendous volatility. Like all commodities, metal pricing is affected by a variety of factors including changing economic patterns, investment fund money, stricter environmental regulations and structural changes within the industries using the metal. Uncertainty leads to volatility and creates financial risk for die casters unless they use effective risk management strategies.