Mini Castings Handbook (3rd ed.)
By John Campbell
ISBN 9781912078363
 
Educated at Cambridge, Sheffield and Birmingham, John Campbell first trained as a physicist, then became a metallurgical engineer, but finally has spent most of his life in foundries where he thinks he has made more aluminum alloy cylinder head castings than he has had hot dinners. 
 
He developed the Cosworth Casting Process, then a novel process making Al alloy cylinder heads and blocks for the Formula One racing engines, using counter-gravity filling of molds by electromagnetic pumps. Later still, after fifteen years as Professor of Casting Technology in the University of Birmingham, UK, he has worked for over ten years with his partner in the USA, John Grassi, to set up a new casting operation, Alotech, helping to develop the new and exciting Ablation Casting Process. He continues to work in foundries around the world, lecturing and training, solving production problems, raising quality and reducing costs.
 
His Complete Casting Handbook, published in 2011, is not light bedtime reading but is a bargain for the determined and fearless reader with an open mind. This Mini Casting Handbook, distilled from the Complete book, and updated, contains the minimum knowledge required to make good castings. Despite his best efforts, he admits this Mini book is still complicated, but reflects that making castings will always be a challenge. He suggests that, for the first time, we now know how to produce essentially perfect castings, every time; promising a welcome revolution in foundry technology.
 
His latest book, The Origin of Fracture – The Mechanisms of Metallurgical Failure describes how the new thinking in casting technology leads to revolutionary new thinking in metallurgy, defining how casting has the potential to achieve metals which cannot fail; metals we can trust.