Who Can You Partner with to Develop a Cost-effective Alloy?
It’s a common business problem: The path to making your product runs into a huge roadblock — it costs too much. For one customer the solution took a long, winding road that eventually led back to him. This customer came to us two years ago with a two-fold problem. First, he was unhappy with the […]
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How We Evolved to Meet a Customer’s Evolving Alloy Melting Needs
The easiest way to describe what we do at Sophisticated Alloys is to say that we solve problems. Sometimes one problem solved just leads to the next challenge. That’s exactly what happened when we became involved with a customer who recycles raw materials. This customer had so much scrap metal that he needed a bulldozer […]
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Have company consolidations left you wondering who can melt your alloys?
Over the last 10 years, a number of companies in the aerospace industry have joined forces. While this probably improved the bottom line of these new conglomerates, you might be sending your alloys melting jobs to a competitor. Here are two scenarios you might run into if you use a competitor as your melt shop: […]
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How we kept a sputtering target customer, even after it went out of business.
“How do I know you do good work?” That’s a question I was asked the other day from a potential customer. Since the majority of our customers come from referrals, I don’t get asked that very often. The project we were discussing involved sputtering targets, so I started telling him about a sputtering targets customer […]
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Are You Using Your Electron Beam Evaporation Equipment Efficiently?
This is a question that, perhaps, you should ask yourself. Often, customers are using production equipment to consolidate and refine raw input materials to make their electron beam evaporation sources. Essentially, they are tying up a very expensive piece of production equipment for a job that could be done in a less expensive way. To […]
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Metallurgist Flies 10,227 Miles for Our Vacuum Melting Services
Imagine you are the head metallurgist involved in a project extracting oil from sand. The sand is so abrasive it’s damaging the pumps, which are an integral part of the process. Every day a pump is out of commission, $100,000 is lost. If you could experiment with different alloys, you know you could determine the […]
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Research Being Done on Custom Alloys to Improve Safety of Nuclear Reactors
When an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, causing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to experience full meltdowns at three reactors, the first concern, of course, was the health and safety of those impacted by the disaster. Now, companies like Sophisticated Alloys are helping to improve materials used in nuclear reactors. This should […]
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A Materials Engineer’s Dream: Access to all the Equipment at a Custom Alloys Company
Any materials engineer knows that evaluating materials that meet specialized performance specifications can be a very time consuming process. Ever wish you could compress a week’s worth of work into a single day? With access to five different vacuum melting furnaces– ranging from a small vacuum arc melter to a 500 lb. vacuum induction melter […]
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Who Do You Call When You Need a Custom Alloy: A University, a Mill or a Specialty Alloys Company?
It can be difficult to decide which type of organization to call when you need a specialty alloy, especially when you are not talking about huge quantities of alloy. Usually, your options are to contact a university, a mill or a specialty alloys company. All three might have the capability to make your alloy, but […]
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