The certificate that ships with the casting, assembled from your heat, test and inspection records.

An order names a grade, sometimes a class and a test bar, and often a few extras. Before it ships, someone in quality pulls the melt or spectrometer record for the heat, the tensile and hardness results, the inspection reports and the heat treat chart, types up a certificate and checks it against what the order asked for.

In the proof of concept, AI works through copies of those records for orders you already shipped and drafts the certificate in your own format, listing each value it checked and the limit it read. A test bar that isn't there, a heat number that doesn't match or a result outside the range is flagged with the reason. Your quality staff decide what any of it means.

A gray iron order can name its test bar. ASTM A48 classifies castings by the tensile strength of separately cast test bars and puts chemistry behind tensile, and its bars are lettered A, B, C or S according to the thickness of the casting's controlling section. So Class 30B tells your customer both the strength class and the bar it is measured on, and a report showing Class 30 on an A bar for a B order is a flag. Where the order gives no letter, the draft marks the gap instead of assuming one.

What passing means changes by specification. ASTM A536 ductile iron rests on tensile, yield and elongation, and chemistry applies only when the contract or order calls for it, along with hardness, microstructure and similar extras. SAE J431 for automotive gray iron sets hardness on the casting itself plus a ratio of test bar tensile to Brinell hardness by grade, a scheme it reworked in 1999. ASTM A27 steel runs from N-1, chemical analysis only, and N-2, heat treated but not mechanically tested, through U-60-30, tested but not heat treated, to grades such as 70-36 that need both, and its abstract names a heat analysis and a product analysis, which are different records. Its common requirements sit in ASTM A781, whose supplementary tests bind only when the purchaser names them on the order. So the draft checks what this order's specification requires, no more and no less.

A heat number may stand for something other than one heat. Under ASTM A48, metal from a continuous melting furnace counts as a lot by time: a stretch of pouring that ends when the charge, the process or the target chemistry changes, or after four hours, which can stretch to eight if the purchaser agrees and the process is shown to be under control. Minnesota DOT's specification 3321 for gray iron castings asks for three test bars for each heat or tap, three for each ladle when alloys go in at the ladle, and two at the beginning and two at the end of a continuous pour. Each casting carries a mark tying it to its bars, a heat number or a calendar date and tap number, and where that tie can't be shown the state may have specimens cut from representative castings. The draft matches on whichever identifier your records use, and a casting with no tie to a bar is flagged.

A test bar speaks for the metal, not the casting. A 2023 Casting Source article makes the point for steel: ASTM's tests are meant to verify the quality of the steel rather than the properties of a particular casting shape, and designers often expect bars machined from a casting to meet numbers written for separately cast bars. Its 2021 piece on copper castings says separately cast bars show only the quality of the metal as poured, warns against bars attached to the casting, and sets out chemistry frequencies from one analysis per order up to a certified analysis per heat. So the draft notes which kind of specimen each result came from, and flags an order whose specified frequency your records don't show.

Proof loads and public work add their own records. The Municipal Castings Association's summary of AASHTO M306 gives a 40,000 pound proof load for H-20 traffic and 50,000 pounds for H-25, a record separate from any tensile result, and North Carolina's guidance on American Iron and Steel for water projects lists municipal castings from manhole covers and valve boxes to trench grates. Your reviewer, usually the quality manager, checks that each certificate pulled the right heat and test, that every flag is real, and that the draft marked nothing as passing. This page describes public rules and isn't legal or engineering advice.

After a yes, each order getting ready to ship gets a draft certificate for about 30 days, early enough to chase a missing bar or lab report.

Quality staff check every draft, then release, correct or stop it. A certificate reaches a customer only after that. The scoring table keeps running, and the next job, if there is one, carries a price of its own.