Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

21 May

Graphite Market Growth After COVID

The news is not a place to look for good news, at least not over the last month. Under the nightmarish headlines about what the virus is doing to people and communities are other frightening headlines about what it’s doing to the economy. In the current environment, with businesses idled and unemployment on a steep trajectory, it is hard to imagine growth in industrial output in anyone’s economic outlook for the short to mid-term. We at Semco, like all other businesses small and large, have watched with concern as events have unfolded. Would this downturn affect the market for graphite...

12 May

Measures to Ensure Air Quality and Social Distancing

A little secret that we know at Semco is that machining graphite is both an art and a science. Graphite machining is a nuanced, complex process that involves collaboration between the client, our engineers and shop floor employees, and our state-of-the-art machines. As much as we thought we had our graphite machining down to a science, the coronavirus has caused us to take stock of and recalibrate some basic aspects of how we run our shop. We produce graphite components for several critical industries, thus we began working under two imperatives during this pandemic: keep up our production and, most...

02 Apr

COVID-19's Effects of Supply Chain

As you have certainly heard, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the world economy, while thousands have died or lost loved ones to the virus. The effects of COVID-19 are being powerfully felt now in America. Most of us, for instance, have likely experienced the direct effects of supplier disruptions at our local grocery stores. The effects on trade continue to ripple and magnify as the virus spreads to all parts of the world. Semco is positioned in an industry that has already experienced serious supply chain disruptions well before COVID-19 overtook parts of Wuhan Province in...

10 Mar

Shipping Practices

Semco’s bread and butter is manufacturing carbon products. We purchase and store raw material (graphite), then we machine it into components that our clients need to run their machines and their businesses. But we don’t just make things--we also ship them. And when it comes to precision graphite components, or any item we’ve manufactured, we take the shipping of the components just as seriously as we take the making of them. After all, what good is a precision graphite part that we machined to exacting specifications if it gets damaged due to poor packaging on the way to a client’s...

21 Jan

The Challenges of Measuring Surface Finishes

Any surface, from a school desk to a basketball court, has a topography with peaks and valleys. On the surface of the earth, topography is readily apparent (except, maybe, in parts of Kansas). But even the smoothest metal surfaces deviate from a theoretically ideal plane. Recent standardization has resulted in the creation of a standard range (Ra) for surface deviation, measured in micrometers or micro inches. With graphite material, these deviations from a perfect plane are typically more pronounced due to the porous nature of graphite. Those small naturally occurring pores in the material have the effect of increasing the...