Architectural Iron

Reliance Foundry produces custom decorative and architectural castings for specific clients - including historic casting reproductions and modern aluminum die castings for exterior architectural features.  Our most common architectural products are our decorative metal Bollards which have become a product specialty of ours in the most recent years.

There has been tremendous interest in the preservation of historic architecture over the past 2-3 decades, coupled with a resurgence of interest in early iron and metal work...it's preservation, it's restoration, and it's reproduction as an art form worth sharing with future generations. This appreciation generated early ironwork restorations, and today it stimulates new works that incorporate the quality in design and workmanship typical of the craftsmanship of the past.  Foundries with production experience in custom ornamental iron castings can reproduce architectural iron castings from drawings or salvaged original pieces. Today, a wide range of architectural metalwork is available from small gray iron details to large architectural pieces of ductile iron.  Bollards, tree grates, lamp standards, and even park benches are all examples of architectural ironwork and metalwork that is widely seen throughout the architecture of most towns and cities today.

There is a common misconception that the term "cast" iron refers to all early iron work; or that early iron work was always "wrought" ...or a combination of both. The distinction between cast and wrought iron is not a matter of old or new, but a difference in metal and chemical composition, and technique in working the metal into a finished piece.

Wrought Iron

Originally, wrought iron was a specific carbon content composition with specific relative elasticity. When heated, it could be skillfully hammered and stretched, artistically twisted and bent into the desired shapes by individual craftsman. Today, what is commonly called wrought iron is mild steel bars which are heated, then "hammered" and bent into shapes ...frequently by machines...to mass produce scrolls, twisted bars and the like, for assembly into finished items. Today's mass produced wrought iron has limited application - especially in fine restorative and reproduction work. As it is commonly manufactured from stock half-inch bars as well as light weight steel channel, the dimensional characteristics of many specific "period" architecural styles can not be achieved. And, with so much "bad iron" in the mass production marketplace today, a question of durability arrises in the use of mass-produced wrought iron components. The artistry and quality of custom-made wrought iron is still available today from a variety of custom iron work specialists.


Cast Iron

Cast iron (aka "grey" or "gray" iron) is, and has always been, a particular composition of iron that is heated to a liquid state and is poured into precision molds carefully prepared for accurate reproduction. Since these molds can take virtually any shape, restricted only by the talent of the patternmaker, the range of cast iron products and castings is practically unlimited.  Cast iron gained great popularity in the United States in the historical nineteenth century, because of it's suitability to the lower-cost mass production process...in a time when wrought iron was still an individual hand craft. With the introduction of mass produced wrought iron, the proliferation of cast iron foundries declined. Casting of iron for architectural work has returned to being more of a custom craft, and often uses Ductile Iron as a material substitution.