Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

14 Oct

Graphite Price and Shortage Update

Over the last couple of years, reliably priced graphite materials have been harder to come by on the world market. As we detailed in an article about the US-China trade war last year, synthetic graphite manufacturing largely depends on coke and pitch produced in China. The ongoing trade war has further troubled the market that was already experiencing stressors from idle production facilities and green initiatives by the Chinese government that slowed the production of coke and pitch. Although we are now seeing some pricing and availability relief on the raw material front, the market for graphite material is still...

25 Sep

Recycle to Recycle: Brush Plating

Recycling is important at Semco. Rather than dispose of old graphite material, we seek it out. Companies send their spent graphite components to us rather than to a landfill. A farmer in Iowa even called us up, asking us to retrieve large pieces of graphite from his cornfield. And it isn’t just other people’s graphite that we recycle. We also recycle over 1 million lbs. of graphite dusk and chunks from our own production facility every year. In today’s graphite market, which has been thrown into mayhem with the current trade war with China and the resulting regulations on production,...

26 Aug

Semco Carbon Appears in Thermal Processing Magazine for a Second Time this Summer!

We are honored that Thermal Processing Magazine is running a profile of Semco Carbon in the most recent edition of their magazine. Semco has a great relationship with the magazine, which recently published an article we authored about several issues that arise in the graphite machining process, particularly difficulties in machining components for advanced heat treat industries. We are proud that Thermal Processing, which publishes important work in our field, took an interest in our company and explored reasons for its success. The profile highlights several aspects of our business, especially our close work with customers from selecting graphite grades...

12 Aug

Semco Machines CFC (Carbon Fiber Composites)

Graphite is our main game at Semco. Our business and reputation are built on years of experience in graphite machining. Our engineers and machinists know just about everything there is to know about working with graphite material. Our customers count on this expertise we have built up over decades of working with carbon materials. It’s never enough to rest on your laurels, though. Semco constantly works to streamline our shop floor operation, include the latest technologies to bolster our graphite machining capabilities, and solve problems that come up for our customers. To grow our business, we also look for new...

05 Aug

Compressive vs. Flexural Strength

At Semco, we think of ourselves as master problem solvers. Since we take the utmost care in the machining of graphite materials, we often find that problems reported by our customers, under careful investigation, turn up issues not related to the quality of the graphite components we machined. Just because we are confident in our product doesn’t mean we stop investigating, though. On the contrary--we want our customers to get the most out of their graphite components. If they are not working properly, or breaking, we will help the customer get to the bottom of the issue, whether or not...