Trade casting in 3 days — what's actually happening at the bench

Most trade casting takes seven to ten days for "fast" service. We do it in three, every working week, and the secret isn't speed — it's that we built the queue differently.

For a small atelier, every day of casting turnaround is a day a customer's piece is sitting in invest plaster instead of being set, finished, and sold. Most workshops run on weekly casting cycles because that's how the equipment manuals tell you to. We don't. Below is exactly what happens between your CAD landing in our inbox and the cast piece sitting on your bench three working days later.

Day one — CAD lands by noon, wax printed by evening

Your file (.STL, .3DM, or .OBJ) hits the trade portal before 12:00. We open it within the hour. If it's casting-ready — right wall thickness, sprue points clear, no water-traps — you have a fixed quote in your inbox by end of day. If it needs work, we tell you what specifically, send the corrected version, and quote that. No three round trips of email.

Once the quote is confirmed, the file queues for printing on the wax bench. We print at DLP resolution with 25-micron layers — surface quality high enough that almost no hand-cleanup is needed before sprueing. The wax is on the tree by 18:00.

Day two — burnout, cast, devest

The flask is invested in plaster the night before, with the water mixed at 38°C. Temperature on the mix matters more than most non-casters realise; it determines surface tension on the cured plaster and ultimately the surface of your piece. The flask cures overnight.

In the morning, the flask goes into the burnout oven for a six-hour cycle: ramping from 200°C to 750°C with three holds. The wax burns out, the plaster cures. By early afternoon the flask is at casting temperature.

We use induction-melt vacuum casting. Crucible temperatures are metal-specific: roughly 1020°C for 18kt yellow gold, 1080°C for 14kt, 1450°C for white gold, and 1850°C for platinum. Each metal has its own crucible — no cross-contamination.

The cast pours, the flask quenches, the piece is devested from plaster. First inspection happens immediately: weight is checked against the CAD-predicted weight (within 0.05g typically), and the surface is examined under 10x. If something's wrong, you know about it the same day, not three days later when you're due to ship.

Day three — clean up, weight, photograph, ship

The piece is clipped from the tree. We hand-finish the base — but only the base. The surface that needs setting is left as cast, because most of you want to do your own bright-cut and stone-seating without our polish in the way. We don't over-polish what you're going to polish yourself.

Final weight, two photographs (full piece + close-up of any concern area), document the cast, attach to your trade quote in the portal. Packed in a carrier sleeve, insured, with the customs paperwork pre-filled if you're outside Belgium. Out the door by 16:00. For most of Europe, that means it's at your bench the next working morning.

Why this works (when most workshops can't)

Three things, in order of importance.

Parallel flask cycles. Most workshops run one or two flasks in rotation, so a new file has to wait for the previous flask to finish. We run six flasks in rotation, staggered by half a day — a new CAD never has to wait more than 12 hours to enter the cycle.

In-house wax printing. We don't outsource to a printing bureau. A bureau adds 24–48 hours to every job and every reroute. Our printer runs three times a day.

Queue management. The CAD file is auto-routed to whichever bench has the lightest queue, not to a foreman who hands jobs out at the start of each week. Capacity stays flat instead of spiking on Mondays.

It's not magic. It's that the bottleneck of most casting workshops is the flask cycle, and we organised the bench around that constraint.

What this means for your timeline

If your customer's piece needs to be in their hand on a Friday, your CAD can land in our inbox the previous Friday and you'll have the cast piece on your bench Tuesday or Wednesday. That leaves Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday to set, finish, polish, certify and ship — comfortably.

You don't need to pad timelines with "casting takes two weeks just in case." It takes three days, and we're predictable enough that you can quote your customer with confidence.

The honest part — when 3 days doesn't apply

Pieces over 50g, multi-flask runs (more than eight pieces in one tree), and unusual alloys (palladium-heavy, hard platinum, customer-supplied gold of unknown composition) go on a slower cycle — typically 5–7 days. We tell you up front.

We also don't do 3-day cycles for first-time files we haven't seen before. If your CAD needs corrections — wall too thin, sprues badly placed, support structures missing — that adds a day per round of corrections. Once we've cast a few pieces from your files, we know your conventions and the cycle is reliable.

What to do next

• Upload a CAD for quote — /trade/casting/ (24h reply, fixed price)
• Trade pricing — /trade/pricing/ (per-gram + casting fee, transparent)
• Open a trade account — /trade/ (VAT + reference required)

By Lukas — goldsmith at Antwerp Ateliers. Lukas runs the casting bench and makes the call on every flask before it goes in the oven.