Being a lifelong Midwesterner, I’m not exactly a stranger to tornadoes, but thankfully I haven’t met any face to face. One night, some 15 years ago, we were under a tornado watch, replete with city sirens, and thus resigned ourselves to a few hours in the basement. Taking tornado safety protocol to a humorous extreme, our “tweenage” daughter and her two overnight friends had big laughs huddling—fully clothed—in the downstairs bathtub. Odd that I also remember my 17-year-old son entertaining the girls (or himself) by sucking down balloon helium that evening and doing remarkable impersonations from the Wizard of Oz.

Ah, that delightful, Oscar-winning, childhood nightmare-inducing favorite! Such a lot of frightful encounters—from angry talking trees and drugged poppies to flying monkeys and a vengeful witch—that could all have been averted with a little training and experience. My goodness, Dorothy certainly did have to learn her life lessons the long way around the block, didn’t she?

But now a question: How many young and/or inexperienced casting buyers and part designers are working in your company today? Have you considered how many lessons they have to learn the hard way? 

Casting isn’t like any other manufacturing process. Has that been explained to the newer members of the procurement team? And as clever and skilled as your young design engineers may be, have they been schooled in the ways of draft, and shrink, and thin walls, oh my?

Are they trying to do their jobs with key process, quality, and lead-time knowledge elusively hidden from their view? I have a solution: Get the whole casting picture in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That’s where the annual AFS Metalcasting Congress will present an entire program for casting buyers and designers April 15 and 15 in the Casting Source Theatre. I have already invited some of the industry’s top experts—including some young brilliant engineers and manufacturing leaders—to headline a lineup of timely and timeless subjects tailored for both new and experienced members of your team.

The best thing you, as a Casting Source Magazine reader, can do for your newer colleagues is to introduce them to AFS and the casting knowledge resources we make available in abundance. Why? The more a casting buyer and a casting designer understands about how castings are made, the more successful they will be in their jobs—and the stronger the metalcasting industry will be. You don’t have to click your heels together or anything, but seriously, there’s no place like AFS.