Forging and Casting

DLA's Forgings and Castings Program is managed by the Aviation Forging & Casting Assistance Team ( AFCAT), a collaboration with the American Metalcasting Consortium (AMC ) and the Forging Defense Manufacturing Consortium (FDMC ).

AFCAT provides wide ranging services to DLA Weapons Support (Richmond), DLA vendors and our Service customers.

Forging and Casting Services include:

Locating tooling
Providing assistance to Aviation Specialists
Identifying foundry & forging sources
Interpreting Contract Drawings – Specifications
Requests for ESA clarification of a technical nature
Assisting foundries and forges
Reducing procurement lead time on out-of-productions items
Offering Technical Information Transfer Seminars in Richmond
Holding Engineering Seminars at Service Engineer Venues

For contractor training sponsored by Headquarters DLA may please contact AMC or FDMC directly.

Assistance Request

You may send us a Casting or Forging assistance request by clicking on our new VE Assistance Request form button below.

► First time users must first register through AMPS (PDF)

Value Engineering Assistance Request Form

Locating Tooling

The subject matter experts that are team members of the Aviation Forging and Casting Assistance Team know the DLA procurement system and also have the technical knowledge to assist foundries and forge shops so they can meet procurement requirements. One of the most common requests AFCAT receives is to help identify tooling.

Tooling includes forging dies, casting patterns and molds, and machining and inspection fixtures. When tooling is not available, interested vendors must plan to have it manufactured during contract performance. This will increase cost and may result in extended lead time.

Once contractors have reviewed the technical data package and identified the part number of casting or forging, you should conduct a search for tooling:

Forgings

Contractors with a subscription to Haystack® Gold should use the National Forging Tooling Database that is part of their subscription. View the Case History for the T-38 Fuel Tank Lug below to see how valuable access to tooling data can be.

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Castings

Depending on the type of casting required, contractors bidding on a DLA or DoD solicitations may wish to look for tooling through the Integrated Casting Order Network (ICON) website. Upon arriving at the ICON homepage, click on the Defense Tooling Locator tab on the top horizontal navigation bar.

In addition, AFCAT encourages foundries interested in castings to register for access to ICON , which combines a casting tooling database with other data sources to simplify the procurement process.