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Custom Refractory Castables

Our design and manufacturing capabilities allow us to make custom shape castables in different materials. Besides fabricating the mold and casting the products, we also have dedicated equipment to pre-fire the castables so our customers do not need to use their assets for what can be a week-long  pre-firing cycle.

Pre-fired and Coated Cook Block
This cook block has purposely been redesigned to have only a 2-inch diameter drain hole.

Additional Features
This block has already been pre-fired for 52 hours to 1600F and is ready to install into your furnace so you may reheat it to your normal furnace operating temperature at the rate of 100F/hr.

The soft chalky white coating is an aluminum oxide material we apply to the top of new cook blocks and is intended to be a non-wetting coating. This will help decrease the penetration of binder material into the cast block.

The white coating has no harmful effects. We invite you to observe whether this white coating helps to repel binder spills so it more completely runs off your cook block rather than absorb into it.

Seven reasons why this Keith cook block is so superior that it will have a longer, useful life:

  • Grooves in the top of our block helps collect radial binder leakage
  • Drain holes drain the binder off the top of the block and beneath the cook block. Your newest Keith furnace may have a catch pan beneath it, if not we can give you the information to add one.
  • Our cook blocks are shipped with a proprietary non-wetting coating applied to them that helps repel binder that leaks onto the top surface of the cook block. Binder that is allowed to soak into a cook block eventually starts to create micro cracking that soon advances in to major cracking that you eventually see with your eye.
  • Quality of castable cement we use purposely has ultra-high thermal shock resistance so opening and closing your furnace hot does not thermal shock, crack and fail your cook block.
  • We slow dry and then very slow fire all cast cooks blocks for nearly 84 hours to 1600F before we ship a cook block to our customer. The first time a newly cast block is fired it needs to be heated this slowly to prevent micro-cracking that will occur if you fire any faster.
  • Because we pre-fire all of our cook blocks before shipping to the customer, our blocks can install and reheat twice as fast without the risk of cracking thus saving about 12 wasted hours of slow, reheating time.
  • Rounded edges and corners of our blocks don't snag mold assemblies that slide on to them and, more importantly, help prevent these edges and corners from thermal shocking and "pinch spalling off" chucks of your cook block.

Every one of these seven improvements incrementally improves the service-life of our cook blocks, and decreases your frequency and downtime replacing blocks. There are five other companies in your industry using our blocks exclusively for these very reasons. To test and prove this to yourself, we invite you to buy one of our blocks to test in your newest Keith furnace that uses a 30-inch square cook block.