First and foremost, let’s talk about location. We are located in Denver, Colorado. We were founded in 1995 with little more than a humble, 2,000 sq ft. shop at our disposal. Kevin Fortin and Mike Kaiser founded Protocast Inc. on speed and 3D printing technology. We created molds with urethane, silicon, and SLAs, using tooling from the 3D pattern. After this, we’d create the plaster molds, with the metal then being poured into the plaster mold to make the casting.
Over the years, we grew in size and in scope of service. In 1998, we moved to a larger shop in Northglenn, a suburb of Denver. We then added a variety of processes as a company and our business developed and technology improved. We added CNC machining in 2002, sand casting in 2005, investment casting in 2008, we added the ability to heat treat casting in-house in 2013, and in 2014, we bought a HAAS gantry-style CNC mill for cutting tools. In 2015, we dramatically expanded the sand casting line, which led us to move from low-quantity to high-quantity production lines, while still maintaining our trademark quality.
Why You Would Need Our Services
We’ll get to our range of services in just a moment, don’t worry, but before we get too far into the weeds here, we might as well explain when and why you would use Protocast Inc.
As a casting company, you’d use us for one of the following purposes:
- When you need to meet stringent project deadlines
- To test for form, fit, and function – eliminate design flaws and other costly problems before production
- When you need parts while ramping-up to full production
- To simulate your die-cast parts before paying for expensive hard tooling
- When you require high quality castings in quantities from 1 to 5,000 pieces per year
For machining purposes, some applications are listed as follows:
- When you need castings post-machined to high tolerances
- When you need parts fully machined from stock
- 10 CNC Vertical Mills and 5th Axis machines
Non-Ferrous Metals: Our Specialty
Here at Protocast Inc., we offer rapid prototype to production castings for a range of industries, with a unique specialty in non-ferrous alloys. Non-ferrous alloys and metals, in case you were wondering, are metals that do not contain iron. That is, there might be trace amounts of iron in a given metal, but not enough to affect anything, if that makes sense. Non-ferrous metals are used because they are usually low in weight (like aluminum), have higher conductivity (like copper), or an alloy might be resistant to corrosion, like zinc.