Custom Carbon & Graphite Machining

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...

16 Jul

Graphite Material Quality #3 Graphite Defects

Series Introduction:Semco has made its name in graphite manufacturing, an industry that requires great investment in tools, technology, and training. Our machining capabilities and ability to customize graphite elements for clients’ manufacturing systems make us a go-to for companies that require industrial components made of carbon. This series of blogs will focus on a more behind-the-scenes, but no less important, aspect of our business: the selection and utilization of high-quality graphite material. At Semco, we take choosing the right graphite grade for each project very seriously because we know that the finished component, no matter how skillfully tooled, will only...

09 Jul

Vacuum Furnace -- Really?

According to Aristotle, nature abhors a vacuum, but we at Semco, and the graphite components we manufacture, especially the ones used in furnaces, love vacuums. What graphite abhors is oxidation, something that occurs in vacuum furnaces when the vacuum is not maintained and oxygen-rich air rushes in. And while flawed material resulting from problems during graphite production may be the first explanation when someone notices deteriorating graphite materials in their vacuum furnaces, what we have learned through investigation is that simple fixes to the vacuum seal of a furnace can save the graphite, and the furnace’s owner, much grief. Let...

02 Jul

Tolerance Stackup

As our readers can see from this blog, we love to talk about what we do at Semco, which means a lot about graphite manufacturing. We enjoy sharing with our clients and others in the industry how we run our graphite machining operation on our shop floor, what our employees thrive at outside of work, where we source our graphite material from, and how we perfect the graphite products we machine for our clients. We have shared our opinion on tariffs and examined reasons why we prefer to provide our clients with the raw material for manufacturing. As engineers, what...