Custom Carbon & Graphite Machining

06 Jun

How to Green a Graphite Company

Semco puts a lot of energy into, well, using less energy. We want to demonstrate what it means to green a graphite company. We’ve written a lot about our efforts to do just that in this blog, and we’re happy to detail another initiative here: switching over our lighting system to new LED lights. If the lighting in our graphite manufacturing center sounds like a small thing, that’s probably because we all take lights for granted. They’re always there -- all you have to do is flip a switch. It’s that very ease of use and ubiquity that makes lighting...

27 May

Networking and Graphite Production

Networking has always been an integral and important tool for Semco, as for any graphite company. Our network doesn’t just facilitate people-to-people communication, but also people-to-machine. As CNC machining has taken on a bigger role in graphite production at Semco, so has our network, which allows our machinists and engineers to program runs and complex jobs. In early 2020, we thought Semco was a highly networked workplace. Then came March 2020. With COVID restrictions, networking has taken on an even bigger role in our graphite company. Departments that understood in-person work as the bread and butter of what they do...

18 May

Graphite Machining into 2nd Shift

It’s no secret: Semco is growing. Our graphite production business has seen a strong uptick over the last year as demand for graphite machining continues to grow. We maximized production at our Lorain facility in every conceivable way to meet demand, including investing in new state-of-the-art machines, upgrading network capacity and remote conferencing for efficiency, and of course investing in our excellent workforce, the people that make Semco a leader in graphite machining. Our business really took off last year with a big push by our sales department. These initiatives have, so far in 2022, rewarded us with increased sales....

02 May

Oxygen and Synthetic Graphite: A Corrosive Relationship

Synthetic graphite has been a boon for industry and is the preferred material for a majority of graphite components. It can be produced with many specifications in mind and is thus customizable for use in very extreme conditions. While heat and pressure are often no match for this wonder material, synthetic graphite does have a kryptonite or sorts: oxygen. To be fair, lots of materials don’t particularly like too much oxygen, and synthetic graphite and oxygen don’t always dislike each other. But as we shall see, when things heat up, oxygen can wreak havoc upon synthetic graphite components. Synthetic graphite...

25 Apr

Inflation, Rising Gas Prices, and Graphite Fabrication

2021 was not a great year to move graphite blocks (or any commodity, truth be told) around the globe. Supplier bottleneck issues, freight costs going up 4, 5 and even up to 10-fold, containers of graphite blocks coming from China costing up to $18000 to ship (that’s up from $2000 a year earlier): the news was bad across the board for graphite fabrication businesses when it came to shipping. Businesses that did not think strategically in 2021 face another very tough year as graphite blocks aren’t getting any cheaper to move around the globe, nor is it getting any cheaper...