Looking for a New Casting Company | dobbertinperformance

The Casting Issues

Our 'Blemished Castings' Fiasco

The casting blemishes were created at the foundry when a worker decided to smooth out some small imperfections, on almost every casting, with a die-grinder - making the blemishes much worse.
Although they attempted to blame the flaws on the shipping, the blemishes were created before the shot-peening process at the foundry - therefore verifying that they were damaged before shipping.
It's a good example of a company not caring about the customer or the finished product - but only their bottom line.
Fortunately, the blemishes are only cosmetic, and less than 1/8" deep.
There are no structural integrity issues associated with the blemishes.

On the Other End of the Spectrum is Our Company.

We always strive to give our customers a great product at a fair price.
We will never sell a blemished part at the same price as a perfect part.
We are currently searching for a reputable casting company for our next order, and those to follow.

When I received my first order from Boose Sand Castings, the parts were in fairly good condition as far as production flaws were concerned. However, each and every piece was riddled with numerous dents, scrapes and gouges on their corners and edges due to the rough handling of the parts by the production crew.

When a freshly cast part was removed from the mold, still hot from the casting process, it was literally thrown onto a pile of other castings, resulting in scores of unnecessary blemishes, on every part, that I had to deal with.

Although the parts were structurally sound and could be detailed and sculptured to an acceptable finish, within a half to a full hour, spending that much time on each casting just to repair someone else's carelessness got old pretty quickly. Repairing a full order of 220 castings translated into several 50-hour work-weeks – for nothing.

After watching Boose Sand Castings typical promo video where they state that satisfying the customer is their main concern and that they won't quit until the customer is happy, I decided to write the owner about my concerns with my last order.

His response was about what I expected, and I quote:

"Once you have your tooling returned, I would highly suggest you start looking for a new low-volume foundry that will polish and bubble-wrap and care for your castings on a one casting to casting basis. (Of course, I never asked for them to be polished, or bubble-wrapped - just to be treated in a manner that didn't destroy them...) Expect to pay a lot more for your castings as well, as you will have to pay for the extra expense that would have to go into the casting to give you the desired end result that you are looking for." (I needed to pay extra for this?)

The thirty-two photos below show the damage on just eight rear castings.

There were 220 castings in total - (front and rear) - all with similar damage.

Below are some photos of the repair process on two upright braces on one rear casting. These repairs are all completed by me before the casting is added to a kit - and by detailing the outer edges of the uprights, the appearance of the entire casting is greatly improved.

Unfortunately, the blemishes between the uprights, made by reckless die-grinding, is something that I don't repair, due to the time involved - and I hate to make excuses for our products, but in most cases, once the adapters are painted and mounted into your project, the 'blemishes' will be out of view.

This is why we dropped the price on the rear kits by $50.00 until this group of castings is gone.

I'm sorry that I couldn't do more, but our kit costs have sky-rocketed the past year.

As far as making these 'blemished' castings look more like custom-made one-off machined parts, there is a simple solution that has been used by custom car builders for decades on everything

from engine blocks and heads to differential housings.

Simply skim-coat the affected areas with a light coat of body filler (Bondo) and detail the part until it looks like a mega-high-dollar machined billet piece!

Below are four photos of blemished castings that we detailed for our car show displays:

Although I thought I had seen everything, nothing could have prepared me for the condition of my final order of rear castings. This was horrible, even for this company, and almost looked like the extensive array of blemishes had been done on purpose - with a die grinder!

After unpacking the order, I also found that they had produced eight more right rear castings than left rear castings. I did eventually talk them into casting eight more of the left castings.

On a positive note - they didn't charge me for the eight additional left rear castings, due to the flaws in 100+ front castings that I had to detail myself.

I talked to some experts, and they surmised that the Boose Quality Castings production team had probably not used a sufficient amount of a 'separation agent' when producing the parts, so the parts stuck to the molds, causing them to be pulled up into hundreds of 'peaks' that needed to be die-grinded away without any regard for the final finish.

So I picked up my patterns and contacted several other foundries. I was told that the patterns had been permanently bonded to the match plates, so any foundry that took my order would have to use the exact same casting machine that ours were cast on at Boose - which was a HUNTER 30 x 32.

Finally, to add insult to injury, Boose just changed their name

from Boose Sand Castings to Boose Quality Castings.

Hey, I'm not making this stuff up...

Below is what I was confronted by when I opened up the crates from Boose Quality Castings.

The twenty-eight photos below are only a small sample of the blemished castings.

Oops... I almost forgot...

In addition to the 100+ Rear Suspension Castings that needed to be detailed there were also

100+ Front Suspension Castings that had to be detailed.

Every casting had a huge flaw and an aluminum buildup right at the shock absorber mounting area. These all had to be ground, sanded and detailed before the final machining could be accomplished.