Ramblings with Raymond is intended to help capture the knowledge of foundry people who’ve enjoyed full and active careers, and make it available to those who are newer to the industry.

In each episode, Raymond hosts a discussion with veterans of the steel casting industry on a variety of topics including discussions of foundry business decisions, operational problems at their plants and how they solved them, and pitfalls to be avoided.

Raymond talks with Peter Macler, who has designed a number of steel foundries, and Ed Kaczmarek, who ran Spokane Industries’ steel foundry about how you think about production processes and equipment in the foundry.
Raymond talks again with Peter Macler and Ed Kaczmarek. This time they discuss how you make capital investment decisions for a steel foundry.
How do we understand the financial structure of a steel foundry? What are important measures of success or critical targets for survival and profitability?
Sand systems are commonly used to move, mix, dispense, and recycle sand in foundries. How do we understand and manage our sand systems? What are equipment and process issues? In this episode we talk about sand systems and some of the sand system challenges steel foundries have faced.
Raymond is joined again by friends and steel foundry veterans Ed Kaczmarek, Peter Macler, and George Hartay for a more in-depth discussion about steel foundry sand systems.
This time, Raymond talks with steel foundry veteran Shrirang Kulkarni, Charlie Monroe (University of Alabama) and Dave Poweleit (SFSA) about Shrirang’s experience with graphite molding for production of railroad and other cast steel wheels.
In this short episode, Shrirang talks about his experiences with boron steel and hot tearing.
This is a continuation of the discussion between Shrirang Kulkarni, Raymond Monroe, Dave Poweleit and Charlie Monroe. The conversation goes into chills (inserts or areas in a mold that promote more rapid cooling and solidification), molding media, solidification behavior and modeling.
This time Raymond is joined by Caelan Kennedy, Jack Lilley, and Paul Rudd to discuss industrial experiments – how problems the causes of things like production variance are identified.
This time, Raymond, Caelan, Jack and Paul discuss heat treatment and quenching in steel foundries. How to operate a heat treatment furnace, how to quench – how fast do you have to quench, what other types of quench can be used.
This time, we talk about 3D printing – specifically direct 3D printing of sand molds and cores for producing steel castings. There are some challenges from a business and operational standpoint, but this technology can reduce costs and lead times.