Founded in 1863 and based in Ennepetal, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, J.D. Brackelsberg produces around 1000 tons of grey, malleable and ductile iron castings every year on two lines. The foundry makes small- and medium-series castings for a wide range of customers and sectors.

Back in 1973, Brackelsberg upgraded its process with a then-state-of-the-art DISAMATIC 2014 vertical moulding machine.

“A DISA was the perfect substitution for our old vibration-press moulding machines,” says Philipp Martin-Mohaupt, operations manager at J.D. Brackelsberg. “It replaced six old machines while giving us extra casting speed. As you can insert cores and filters during moulding without stopping the machine, we rarely exceeded a cycle time of 13 seconds.”

Time and time again, Brackelsberg’s versatile moulding line has proved its speed and all-round ability, producing everything from gearbox housings to lift and sewing machine components in varying run lengths.

“We run all kinds of castings that fit on our DISA’s plates,” says Martin-Mohaupt, “producing small and medium series in different materials for a really diverse range of industries. We added a superstructure to the Automatic Mould Conveyer (AMC) plates in order to raise casting weight up to 40 kg per mould but, other than that, we’ve not changed it much in 50 years.”

“Our DISAMATIC has run and run for us without any major downtime and its robust mechanical design meant we were always able to rectify any faults ourselves,” continues Martin-Mohaupt.

As the Brackelsberg team gets ready to retire its long-serving DISA moulding, it’s planning for a more digital, more sustainable future – and a new generation of DISAMATIC.

“We’re currently planning to install a new DISA moulding line to replace our old model, probably a DISAMATIC C3,” says Martin-Mohaupt. “With the new machine, we will simultaneously change our chamber size, allowing us even more flexibility in pattern making and therefore in our production.”

Staying with DISA looks like an obvious choice for Brackelsberg, due to its legacy machine’s history of “accuracy, moulding speed, long lifetime and high reliability”.

“Maintenance has been easy and we’ve been able to do it ourselves,” says Martin-Mohaupt. “We expect a new DISAMATIC will require even less maintenance than our old one.”