Sarginsons Becomes First UK Foundry With 3D Sand Core Printing

Sarginsons Industries, based in Coventry, has become the first foundry in the UK to install inorganic 3D sand core printing technology. The company put down £800,000 for a voxeljet system capable of printing sand cores at roughly 54 litres per hour.

The system prints sand cores without binders, using a thermal inkjet process that deposits liquid binder only where needed. The resulting cores are mechanically strong enough for aluminium casting, and they eliminate much of the tooling lead time that holds back low-volume production.

Sarginsons is targeting the automotive, hydraulics, and industrial pump markets. The company claims it can now produce a complete aluminium casting in 24 hours, from CAD file to finished component. That is a dramatic compression of what used to take weeks.

Why UK foundries care

The British foundry sector has been slow to adopt additive sand printing compared with Germany and the US. Most UK job shops still rely on wooden or metal tooling for sand cores, which works for high-volume runs but kills flexibility when designs change.

Inorganic 3D sand printing removes that bottleneck. There is no core box to store, no wear on tooling, and no minimum order justification. It also produces geometries that traditional core-making cannot match: hollow passages, undercuts, and internal channels that would require multi-piece assemblies with conventional methods.

What comes next

Sarginsons plans to offer the service commercially to external customers once the installation is fully validated. The company is positioning itself as a bridge between one-off prototype castings and full production runs, a segment that has grown as automotive and aerospace OEMs push for lighter, more complex components.

If the 24-hour casting model holds up to repeat orders, it could attract small manufacturers that currently outsource work to overseas foundries simply because domestic lead times are too long.