Custom Carbon & Graphite Machining

25 Aug

Hot Zone Maintenance

As we’ve explained here before, graphite is a versatile material. Because of the material’s versatility, and because we specialize in machining custom components for our clients, Semco ends up manufacturing a dizzying array of graphite components. We have several standbys, though -- components we frequently machine for our customers -- such as graphite heaters, or hot zones. In a prior post, we discussed several key factors for choosing the best hot zone for your needs. In this blog, we follow up that discussion by going over proper maintenance for your hot zone. Read on to learn ways to extend the...

14 Aug

Graphite Property: Thermal Shock

In business, as in many other parts of life, there really is no replacement for experience. The schooling and enthusiasm of the apprentice is no match for the master’s depth of knowledge acquired from long experience. At Semco, not only do our graphite specialists have deep personal experience in the field, but our decades of custom machining graphite material have helped to build great institutional memory that gets passed down from long-time to new employees. We frequently use this blog to detail what we’ve learned from some of our experiences solving customer problems. Recently, we learned something about a particular...

03 Aug

What is Graphite Cement

To the wider public, the poster-boy of graphite applications is probably the pencil. In this blog, we will feature one of the many unsung but useful graphite products that we offer at Semco: graphite cement. While graphite is a durable material, it does happen that time, long-term use, and extreme conditions can lead to failure in graphite components. Rather than shelling out for new components, consider graphite cement for your graphite in-house repairs. What is graphite cement? Graphite cement is a paste-like material that joins graphite with a 100% carbonaceous bond. It remains secure at temperatures up to 5000ºF (Approx.2700ºC)...

27 Jul

What is Graphite?

What is Graphite And Where Does Graphite Come From?We’ve written a lot in this blog about our primary material, graphite. So what is graphite? The word graphite comes from the Greek word graphein, which means "write" (due to it's use as pencil lead). As for the molecular structure, Graphite is made from carbon atoms, which have four valence electrons. While natural graphite occurs primarily in metamorphic rock mined in many countries from South America to Eastern Asia, we want to clarify that when we talk about graphite in most industrial applications, we are discussing synthetic graphite (so this is the...

14 Jul

Ohio Safety Grant

Over the last few months, safety has been on everyone’s mind. From going to the store to working around others, most of us have considered our personal safety and the safety of those we come into contact with even more than we normally do. While Semco has done an exemplary job protecting our employees during the pandemic, the coronavirus is not the only danger to our employees that we have been thinking about. As a company that prides itself on its safety consciousness, we continue to look for areas of improvement within our graphite machining shop. Our employees’ safety is...