Sarginsons Becomes First UK Foundry With Inorganic 3D Sand Printing

Inside Sarginsons Industries’ Coventry foundry, a new printer is turning sand into casting cores at roughly 54 liters per hour. The £800,000 installation makes Sarginsons the first UK caster to run an inorganic 3D sand-core printing process, the company says.

The prize is time. Sarginsons believes the system could bring aluminium casting lead times down from six to eight weeks to as little as 24 hours. That is a possibility the foundry is projecting, not a result confirmed by an independent production trial.

The material inside the process matters too. Conventional organic binders release gases during casting, and those gases can become trapped in the metal, degrading quality and mechanical performance. Sarginsons says its inorganic binder system nearly eliminates those gases and removes the emissions tied to conventional binders.

The practical consequence for OEMs is a faster path to complex, lightweight aluminium components. Shorter casting cycles could let manufacturers develop such parts without losing manufacturability, while the binder change addresses a source of emissions and potential casting defects.

Sarginsons led the £5.8m government-backed PIVOT program and is drawing up proposals for a £30m Future Foundry casting industrialization hub. The printer is therefore part of a broader push around aluminium casting, but the installation itself remains an early industrial deployment rather than proof that every casting will meet the projected 24-hour timetable.