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...

01 May

Semco is an Essential Business

Semco would like to share an important status update with our clients: through the current crisis, our graphite production operation will remain open. With the COVID pandemic pushing federal and local governments to institute various closures and social distancing measures, we wanted to reassure our customers that Semco will continue producing graphite products that they rely on. With close to 50 years of graphite production experience, Semco machines many parts and components that are used in essential products and processes across various industries. To get our clients the graphite components they need to run their important businesses, our company has...

23 Apr

Graphite vs. Carbon--Distinct Materials

Here’s a quiz for you: which element occurs in the human body the most, next to oxygen, and is present in all known life forms? If you remember much about high school biology, you probably guessed carbon. And you’re right. Here’s another quiz: what industrial material conducts electricity well, tolerates temperatures up to 2800℃, and is shaped into thousands of useful tools and components on a shop floor in Lorain, Ohio? If you guessed carbon again, you’re close. Carbon and this material are sometimes referred to interchangeably. Try again. That’s right, graphite. But are graphite and carbon the same thing?...

14 Apr

Graphite Cement

It’s a Hollywood trope: the camera takes us inside a smelting factory or other metallurgical hothouse to establish an atmosphere of intense industrial heat and violence. In the center of these images is usually some sort of giant crucible bubbling over with what looks to be flaming magma. Think the orcs’ sword factory in the second Lord of the Rings movie. As huge as these factories appear, one imagines the even bigger factory that would be needed to produce that giant crucible! Sure, it’s the movies, but there is a real-world answer to that mystery of the giant crucible: graphite...