investment casting

Investment casting is an industrial process which employs in-process control at every point. Highly refined on-line process control methods are backed up with laboratory skill. Every casting shipped--and this applies equally to orders for a dozen castings or half a million--can be relied on to meet the designer's performance specification.
The principles of investment casting are the same for both the solid mold and shell processes. It is only in the method of forming the ceramic mold that they differ. Both require a pattern, gating to a central sprue, a ceramic mold (either solid or shell), removal of pattern by melting, pouring metal into the cavity left by the melted pattern, removal of mold material from the cast cluster and cutting of castings from the sprue.