Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

05 Nov

Recycle to Recycle: Electrolysis Rust Removal

At Semco, we love carbon products, and we’re distressed to think that many end up being unnecessarily thrown away and eventually end up in a landfill. To prevent the waste of our beloved carbon graphite, we have posted about ways to recycle it. Last month we posted a blog titled “Recycle to Recycle: Brush Plating” in which we detailed how recycled graphite can be used in the brush plating process, which is a method of plating that uses an applicator hooked up to an electrical current to brush on the plating metal. Brush plating works by using a portable power...

01 Oct

Company History

For just shy of 50 years now, Semco Carbon has provided customers with graphite material in both raw and machined forms. With this milestone ahead of us in a couple of years (Semco was founded in 1971), we thought it would be a good time to look back on Semco’s history and trace the company’s arc from provider of raw carbon materials and simple graphite components to one of the most respected names in the graphite machining field. The story of Semco begins with our founder Vince Thompson Jr. When Vince founded Semco is 1971, many of the technologies the...

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,...

11 Mar

Graphite - High Powered Rockets and Future Rocketeers

Semco are graphite suppliers to many businesses, but one of our favorite roles is supplier to high school science programs. This is a small but, to us, very important part of our business: we provide material either free of charge or at greatly reduced prices to educational programs that require small quantities of graphite. When our future scientists determine there is a graphite solution to a rocketry problem or other engineering project, Semco is happy to search our inventory for any graphite pieces appropriate for the task. Graphite Solution One high school Semco partners with to deliver graphite material for...

04 Oct

A Closer Look at Carbon Recycling

At Semco, we are the graphite machining experts, but one overlooked aspect of our business is our sustainability effort around graphite recycling. Recycling used graphite materials has environmental and economic benefits. We work with individuals and businesses to realize those benefits while increasing their storage space and saving them laborious and costly trips to the landfill. Graphite is unlike many substances found in landfills—it does not easily degrade. While organic matter, or even plastics, will either decompose or break up into smaller and smaller pieces over the years, graphite holds up for a long time, and thus retains industrial value....