Oil Well Seal

This is a seal on a drill head.  It costs as much as half a million dollars To pull up a drill string so it is Important that parts hold up.  In this case the customer wanted to use a tungsten carbide ring for a seal. 

Major Problems

1. Find a piece of carbide seven inches across and no thicker than a nickel that would be flat and level.  Fortunately people at the top end of an industry usually know each other so we could find a supplier. 

2.  Braze the part so that the thermal cycling and the differences in coefficients of expansion wouldn't crack the carbide, warp either part or leave gaps or weak points in the braze joint. 

We did the original project with customer supplied parts.  we did the first parts a couple years ago.  They are now in service and delivering 10 to 20 times the life of previous parts.

We can do this with customer supplied parts or we can delivered finished parts from drawings.    

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Torch Braze Ceramic Saw Tips

There are many cermets and ceramics used in mechanically held applications that could also work well in brazed applications.   

Major Problems

1.  Tool tips are made to be wear and corrosion resistant.  The more they resist wear and corrosion the harder it is to get braze alloy to bond well. 

2.  There were previous methods of bonding ceramics but they were very expensive because they required special alloys, special equipment or both.   In any case the joints created were much too weak for use in tools such as saw mills saws.    

It took a while but we developed an inexpensive treatment technology that allows us to braze cermets and ceramics using the same alloys and equipment as are used for tungsten carbide.

We now have a couple hundred customers using our Cermet 2 advanced grades as well as others using true cermets and even alumina.

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