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A Brief History About Investment Casting
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Today in this article we try to introduce a brief history about the investment casting process. As an old but new casting methods, the investment casting developed as the new technology raised from time to time. Thanks to the development of modern technology, casting materials and machines, even the basic procedure is almost the same as it was used thousands years ago, the investment casting become very modernized and the castings have much better surface and tight tolerances at a high production efficiency.
The history of lost-wax casting dates back thousands of years. Its earliest use was for idols, ornaments and jewelry, using natural beeswax for patterns, clay for the moulds and manually operated bellows for stoking furnaces. Examples have been found across the world in India's Harappan Civilisation (2500-2000 BC) idols, Egypt's tombs of Tutankhamun (1333–1324 BC), Mesopotamia, Aztec and Mayan Mexico, and the Benin civilization in Africa where the process produced detailed artwork of copper, bronze and gold.
The earliest known text that describes the investment casting process (Schedula Diversarum Artium) was written around 1100 A.D. by Theophilus Presbyter, a monk who described various manufacturing processes, including the recipe for parchment. This book was used by sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), who detailed in his autobiography the investment casting process he used for the Perseus with the Head of Medusa sculpture that stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy.
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