Sigma didn't begin with a furnace, or a plan to manufacture anything at all. It began with an idea that most people in this industry don't try: that a foundry with strong manufacturing capability but weak engineering support, and an engineering team with nowhere to prove its ideas, could both grow faster together than apart.
Our original plan was simple, and it wasn't to own a foundry. We wanted to partner with foundries that already knew how to manufacture, but lacked engineering support, production planning, and steady customer orders. Sigma would bring engineering knowledge, planning and relationships. The partner foundry would bring the shop floor. Both would grow.
It worked, technically. Castings got made, customers got served. But growing that way — coordinating engineering decisions across a foundry we didn't operate — became difficult to scale. Something had to change, but not the idea itself.
The equipment we needed to move forward was expensive, imported, and out of reach. So we designed and built our own moulding machine — not as a product, not as a business idea, but because we had no other way to keep working.
That machine was never intended to be sold. It was built to solve our own problem.
Then another foundry, watching what we'd done, came to us with a moulding problem of its own. That request became our first engineering project — one we hadn't planned for and hadn't pitched. From that point on, our engineering capability has grown the way it always has since: not from a decision to enter a new business, but from someone else's real problem landing on our desk.
Every machine, every system, every engineering capability inside Sigma today can be traced back to an actual manufacturing problem that needed solving. That's still true of the work we do now.
Manufacturing castings and engineering foundries were never one built to serve the other. They grew side by side, each one shaping the other as we went.
Manufacturing gave our engineering somewhere real to be tested — no idea stayed theoretical for long when it had to survive on our own floor. Engineering, in turn, kept changing how we manufacture — every machine we designed, every process we tightened, fed straight back into how our own castings get made.
That's still how it works today. A problem on the casting side often becomes the next engineering idea. An engineering idea, once proven, often becomes a better way to cast. Neither side is waiting on the other — they've simply never stopped moving together.
Some of that back-and-forth happens at Influxtek, our own manufacturing facility — its layout, moulding line, sand systems, mould boxes, tracks, handling systems and much of its production workflow were designed by our own engineers, for our own use, before any of it was offered to anyone else.
Influxtek isn't a separate business we're building alongside Sigma. It's simply where a lot of our thinking gets proven before it reaches a customer's foundry.
We still don't start with a product. Before recommending anything, we understand the customer's business first — visit the plant, study the layout, watch production, find where it's actually getting stuck.
We believe the best solution isn't the biggest investment. We recommend the smallest practical improvement that delivers measurable return first — and let that improvement fund the next one. A foundry doesn't need to gamble on a full transformation to start moving forward; it needs the first step that actually pays for itself.
This is slower than selling a machine off a catalogue. It's also the only way we know how to be right more often than we're wrong.
We built it by solving real manufacturing problems, one at a time — and that mindset still guides everything we do today. Manufacturing is where most of our energy goes now, and our foundry engineering capability keeps growing alongside it — not as a separate venture, but as the same instinct that built our very first machine, still showing up wherever there's a problem worth solving.