Mar 19, 20222 min read

Extrusion Billet : Assessing your standards.

Its a question put to many production and process employees from the sales and, more importantly from the senior management team "How good is our actual product quality"? Sales are always looking to differentiate and gain an angle to increase their upcharge sale price or lever upon "our better than - competitors quality", and why not!

When we look at extrusion billets the quality can vary depending upon a number of important factors, however these factors are all controllable by good process housekeeping and an experienced team. Be they chemical, metallurgical, physical or a combination of all three.

Final processing of the billets at your customers premises, well, their own recovery is very much dependant upon you, the supplier, and how you manage your own internal process. You process must be robust, repeatable, controlled, data driven and have some kind of closed loop assessment. This is clear and the casthouse is very much a good starting point. However don't neglect procurement right back to buying and receiving good alloying hardeners, material inspection, furnace preparation, casting, homoginisation and of course QA inspection.

Over the years I have worked on several projects to benchmark industrial standards covering all the major, minor and influential aspects of quality and quality control to ensure that the equipment is maximised not only for production volume, but also for repeatability and reproducibility of critical parameters thus ensuring a robust product delivered to the client.

Some key pointers would be as follows and a good starting point :

Chemical

Metallurgical

Physical