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USA - Alcoa Achieves One-Year Milestone with Honda

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CLEVELAND, OH - Alcoa Forged and <link _top>Cast Products announced a one-year milestone in contributing to the success and sleekness of Honda’s most popular model – the Accord. A year ago, Honda and Nissen Chemitec America put into service the first high-volume production tool made from Alcoa’s newest <link _top>mold <link _top>alloy, QC-10®. Honda is using this production tool on its highest selling platform with excellent results.

With the nameplate QC-10, Alcoa’s proprietary aluminum <link _top>mold <link _top>alloy is exceptionally durable and proved to Honda and Nissen’s automotive tooling engineers that there is a better alternative to P20 steel for production tooling. The new <link _top>mold demonstrated a 20 percent decrease in cycle time, producing 180 additional parts per day compared to the steel tool. Today, more than 300,000 components have been produced from the QC-10 production tool.

“We invested in Alcoa’s QC-10 and quickly realized a number of significant benefits, including continued reduction in the cycle time required <link _top>to mold each part, added durability and a reduction in the cost of the <link _top>mold,” said John Engle, Honda staff engineer. “An ideal outcome, which companies seldom see, is reduced costs, improved quality, and increased speed. The QC-10 has satisfied all three of these key objectives for Honda.”

According to Victoria Kale, marketing manager, Alcoa Forged and <link _top>Cast Products, QC-10 has proven in this case that aluminum can stand up in a production environment and perform extremely well. “We’ve seen tremendous success with Honda and believe the value and benefits of QC-10 go beyond this particular part or even automobiles,” said Kale. “We look forward to its potential in more plastics manufacturing applications.”

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