Who it's for
You pour metal, and the expensive surprises land late: a section that won't feed, a pattern price someone recalled, a yield nobody scored. Partimation screens the casting before tooling, runs fill and solidification physics on every casting job, prices the pattern into the piece, and quotes on your foundry's rates.
Is this you?
You pour metal for a living. Sand, printed sand, permanent mold, high-pressure die — the job arrives as a model and a date, and somebody has to say yes to it before anyone knows whether that heavy section will feed, what the pattern really costs, or what the yield will be on your floor. You have been wrong about all three at least once, and you remember what it cost. This page is written for the person who signs the quote: the owner, the chief estimator, the foundry engineer who gets asked "can we pour this?" at four o'clock on a Friday. Castimation is the same suite and the same account, scoped to the pour, and the pages linked below are where each piece of it lives. If you buy castings rather than make them, the procurement page is the better read — this one assumes you own the pattern, the pour and the scrap.
A typical day
The RFQ is a model and a delivery date. You price it against the nearest job you can remember, the pattern gets cut, and the section that will never feed finally gets discussed properly at first article — months after every decision that caused it was made.
Fill and solidification analysis means booking somebody and waiting for a slot in their week, so it happens on the work already judged important enough. The scrap tends to arrive from the work that wasn't.
Orientation and riser placement get set from experience, and the yield figure in the quote comes off memory or a spreadsheet. Nothing scores it against what your own poured jobs actually returned, so it never gets better or worse — it just stays.
Degating, fettling, heat treat, the crane you have, the flask you actually own — an industry-average price book knows none of it. So the number comes out of the tool and then gets a hand correction applied before anyone will put their name on it.
What changes
Thin walls, hot spots, undercuts and missing draft are flagged on the uploaded part and mapped onto the 3D model, each carrying the rule that caught it — while the fix is still a CAD edit rather than a re-cut pattern.
GPU lattice-Boltzmann fill returns fill order, the last regions to fill and trapped-air risk; transient solidification returns freeze order and which risers actually feed. Both run on every casting job, not only the ones somebody booked a specialist for.
One block-and-machining model prices patterns, core boxes, dies and molds and amortizes them into the per-piece should-cost curve instead of landing as a lump sum nobody can check — and every line on the quote traces back to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine.
Set your machine rates, labor rates and cost model once and every quote pulls from them. Flask size, platen, daylight and handling limits are checked against the machine classes you actually run, with a named reason when a part exceeds one. Casting-yield ranking for orientation and riser placement is scored against your own recorded jobs, and refuses to be trusted if it isn't beating a simple baseline.
Parting line, core geometry and flask fit compute automatically for sand casting, with a dedicated should-cost path for printed sand molds and cores when the pattern shop isn't the answer.
Where to start
Undercuts, thin walls, hot spots and missing draft usually surface at first article, when the pattern or the die already exists. Partimation flags them on the uploaded part with the rule that caught each one, and runs GPU fill and solidification physics on every casting job — before anyone commits steel.
Tool cost is usually a figure someone remembers from the last job that looked like this one. Partimation prices dies, molds, patterns and core boxes through one shared block-and-machining model and amortizes the tool into the per-piece should-cost curve, so the number has a basis you can push back on.
A quote nobody can take apart is a quote nobody can defend. Partimation builds the price as an itemized ledger where every cost line traces to a named rate, posture setting, or engine rule — and every estimate carries a confidence band that states which of four bases it rests on.
The quote said eleven hours, the floor ran fourteen, and the next quote for the same family said eleven again. Every cost line names the rate or rule that produced it and states what its confidence rests on, so a correction lands on the line that was wrong and tightens the bands on the jobs after it.
Manufacturability feedback that arrives after release is a change order, not a review. Partimation returns findings on every upload, before a process has been chosen, and runs a real removal simulation against the tooling you actually run to show exactly which stock a cutter cannot reach.
A ductile-iron housing, 180 a year in green sand, and the pattern shop wants the go-ahead Friday. Here is what a foundry puts the model through first: casting findings mapped onto the part with the rule that caught each one, parting line and flask fit for the sand job, and a pour run inside the quote.
Twelve grey-iron manifolds off printed sand, and the customer's engineer wants the price broken down before he approves a pattern. Here is what a foundry can show him: the route including degating, fettling and queue time, a ledger where every line names its rate or rule, and a confidence basis per number.
A repeat customer wants two numbers for an A356 valve body at 6,000 a year: tooling paid up front, and tooling carried in the piece price. Here is how a foundry prices the pattern, core boxes and permanent-mold die off this part's own geometry, amortizes the tool into the curve, and reads the crossover quantity.
FAQ
Castimation is the casting-scoped entry to the same suite and the same account: the casting findings mapped onto the part, the fill and solidification runs, the parting line and flask fit for a sand job, and your own rates, equipment checks and recorded yield all live there. Patterns, core boxes, dies and molds price through the shared tool-cost model on the Partimation side, so the tooling line and the piece price come out of the same quote rather than two of them.
GPU lattice-Boltzmann fill and transient solidification run on every casting job rather than as a separate exercise somebody books a slot for. Fill order, the last regions to fill and trapped-air risk come back from one; freeze order and which risers actually feed come back from the other. The jobs that produce the scrap are usually the ones nobody would have booked a specialist for.
Pattern, core box, die and mold costs come out of one block-and-machining model and amortize into the per-piece should-cost curve instead of landing as a lump sum. Every line on the quote traces back to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, so a buyer asking what the tooling line is made of gets an answer rather than a total.
Casting-yield ranking for orientation and riser placement is scored against your foundry's own recorded job outcomes, and refuses to be trusted automatically if it isn't beating a simple baseline. Your machine rates, labor rates and cost model are set once and every quote pulls from them, and flask, platen, daylight and handling limits are checked against the machine classes you actually run.
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