Upload your part. Get its weight, size and a castability check — before you call.

What this tool does

It measures a STEP file and tells you what the casting will weigh, how big it is, and whether it looks castable in sand. Upload a .step or .stp solid up to 25 MB and it reads the file with the OpenCascade geometry kernel, takes the exact volume and surface area, meshes the surface, measures wall thickness two independent ways, and returns the weight in seven alloys, the bounding box, and a castability verdict with the reason for every rule written out. It takes a few seconds. It is free, needs no sign-up, and shows no price — the price is quoted by a person at Lahore Casting over WhatsApp.

Weights, and where they come from

Weight is volume × density and nothing else — no machining allowance, no gating, no risers, no shrinkage. The volume is exact B-rep geometry, never taken from the mesh. These are mid-range handbook densities, so the weight is only ever as good as they are; grey iron alone runs 7.0–7.3 g/cm³ with carbon equivalent.

Lahore Casting pours ferrous alloys only — iron and steel, 1 kg to 500 kg. The aluminium, brass and bronze weights are a convenience for comparing materials, not an offer to cast them.

What the four verdicts mean

• green Every rule that ran is clear of its threshold.
• amber At least one rule is near a threshold. That means “go and look”, not “no”.
• red At least one rule is past a threshold. Still a reason to talk to the foundry, not a refusal to cast.
• not_assessed The rules did not run, so there is no opinion — the file could not be read, the mesh could not be built, or the analysis ran out of time. It is not a bad verdict. If the solid was read, the weight is still measured and still good.

What it is not

Not a price. Nothing in this service knows what metal, patterns or machining cost, and it never prints a number with a currency on it. Not a reviewed engineering opinion. The castability rules are v0 heuristics — validated against synthetic shapes with known answers and smoke-tested against the foundry’s 38-part library, but not yet against a single scrapped casting. Not able to tell a cast feature from a machined one: a bolt circle drilled after casting reads as a set of thin ligaments and can push a verdict to amber for a reason that will not exist in the mould. And not a mesh tool — STL, IGES, Parasolid and 3MF are refused; export STEP AP203 or AP214.

Calling it from a program or an AI agent

One POST is the whole integration. No API key, no sign-up, 20 estimates per hour per IP.

curl -sS -F file=@part.step -F alloy=grey_iron \
  https://estimate.lahorecasting.pk/api/estimate

Machine-readable descriptions: OpenAPI 3.1 · llms.txt · llms-full.txt · JSON-LD. Expect the call to take a few seconds and set a client timeout of at least 180 s; the server’s own ceiling is 150 s.

Who runs it

Lahore Casting is a sand-casting foundry at Mominpura Road, Wahga Town, Lahore 54000, Pakistan. Medium-frequency induction melting at 100–500 kg per heat; iron and steel castings from 1 kg to 500 kg poured to a drawing or to a sample part; pattern shop, heat treatment, machining, and an OES spectrometer on every heat, in-house. WhatsApp +92 300 4212184, Monday–Saturday 07:00–19:00 PKT. The estimate is free because every one of them is a conversation the foundry would like to have.