For more than 5,000 years, investment casting has produced a wide variety of metal products. The process is currently used to manufacture everything from surgical implants to jet engine turbine blades.
Known also as lost-wax casting, it begins in the wax room, where a wax pattern of the product is created using a wax-injection machine. This pattern is then attached to a runner and dipped in a ceramic slurry in a shell room. After the slurry dries, the wax is melted and removed. This leaves a perfect mold, which is subsequently filled with a molten metal. Once the metal hardens, the ceramic shell is removed to reveal a perfect metal copy of the original wax pattern.