Toolmaking For your needs

Precision Tooling For Superior Casting

When you specify high pressure die casting for a complex application – such as a medical device or aerospace component – the tool is where most of the risk lives.

A casting can be inspected, machined, tested and signed off but if the tool itself is poorly designed, badly specified or difficult to maintain, that risk resurfaces on every single shot for the life of the programme.

So before you commit a part to a foundry, it’s worth understanding exactly how they design, build and look after their tooling – not just how many years they’ve been doing it.

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Who Actually Builds The Tool – And Who’s Accountable For It

MRT Castings has a small in-house tool room with dedicated turning and large capacity CNC machining centres, supporting die preparation, routine maintenance, urgent repairs during live production, and the manufacture of machining, trimming, assembly and inspection fixtures. 

We also run additive manufacturing on site, used for nests on machining fixtures and grippers for robot loaders, where a quick, accurate one-off part beats waiting on a conventional supply chain.

For new gravity and high pressure diecasting tooling projects, we work with a small, tightly managed group of specialist sub-contract toolmakers across the UK and Europe. We’ve worked with these partners for many years, across a substantial shared portfolio of projects. 

That history matters: they understand our manufacturing cells, our design philosophy and our quality standards – so a new tool isn’t designed in a vacuum by someone guessing what our casting technology can do. Tools are designed in partnership with a team that can optimise the tooling to get the maximum benefit from our advanced machinery. We retain full responsibility for design, project management and sampling throughout – regardless of who cuts the steel. You have one point of accountability, not a foundry pointing at a toolmaker and a toolmaker pointing back.

Thinking Beyond The Die

Toolmaking decisions don’t stop at the diecasting tool. The close, day-to-day collaboration between our casting technicians, tooling designers and toolroom engineers means that the manufacturing specialists who will be producing your parts will also play a key role in designing the tooling, incorporating their extensive experience and expertise into optimising the die to make it process capable.  For existing tools, this collaboration also means the diecasting tooling adjustments and repairs get actioned quickly, without a design being handed over and left to interpretation.

Our machining engineers design and build fixtures for accurate, repeatable workholding and efficient loading, so a diecasting tool is specified with an eye on how the part will be held during machining – not just how it will fill and eject.

Inspection fixtures are built to replicate the same workholding characteristics used in manufacturing, so what gets measured genuinely reflects what gets made. We treat tooling, machining and inspection as one connected system, rather than three separate tasks – it keeps dimensional drift and handling variation out of the process.

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When A Tool Needs Attention

Tools wear, and on demanding applications they can wear unevenly. What separates a good toolmaking setup from a risky one is how quickly a worn or damaged tool gets diagnosed, corrected and back into production – and by whom.

Our toolroom engineers work alongside the casting technicians running the tool day to day, so we proactively identify any potential issues and deal with them to ensure they don’t show up as a dimensional non-conformance or a scrapped batch. Modifications don’t wait on the availability of a distant third party who’s never seen the tool run.

Proving It In

Every new tool is fully sampled and submitted with dimensional reports, produced in-house on our own CNC co-ordinate measuring machines – not outsourced to whoever built the tool marking their own homework. All toolmaking is managed within our ISO 9001 quality system, and our toolmaking partners are regularly audited against it.

80 Years of Getting This Right

MRT has been designing, building and running diecasting tooling for nearly 80 years. That’s not a claim about longevity for its own sake, it’s 80 years of identifying and stopping the ways in which a tool can go wrong – on alloys, geometries and volumes across aerospace, medical and other demanding sectors. So we have the in-house capability and trusted partner relationships to ensure precision quality, consistency and full accountability throughout the entire process.

Contact our specialist engineers to discuss your toolmaking requirements.

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