Elastomerics Blog

Stockwell Elastomerics has worked continuously throughout the last year to improve service to our customers. Material availability has been a challenge. But now, key material partners have made significant improvements in availability and and lead times have shortened in the last 6 months. We have also worked to increase our internal manufacturing capacity to return to our historical service levels for both development of new products and production of proven products.

Rapid Response
We have focused dedicated resources to increase capacity to do fast turnaround design and prototyping work for select applications. In late 2022 and in addition to our focused applications engineering team of 4, we expanded an internal cross functional team (5 members) to drive new programs. The Stockwell Rapid Response Team works directly with our customers to develop fully validated products to commercialization in a compressed timeline.

New Manufacturing Cell Layouts
We have reconfigured 2 major manufacturing cells to increase throughput in on-site manufacturing. Manufacturing team members have completed projects in the converting area as well as the material handling area. In the converting area, the teams reconfigured the cell to increase run time of the machines while decreasing the path of material flow. In the material handling area, production was moved closer to material storage to increase speed for material selection and quality inspection as the high performance silicone materials advance to the next steps in the production process.

Capacity Expansion
Stockwell Elastomerics completed the previously announced expansion in the liquid injection molding and compression molding operations. We also added 40% more laminating capability during the past year. Stockwell Elastomerics purchased additional waterjet cutting capability that is currently being built to add to the flash cutting capacity that was added in 2021.

Product Lead time Reductions
We are reducing product lead times in general, and specifically for various products that include:

• Environmental / Chamber Port Plugs – 2 weeks, 2 days for stocked items
• Standard Silicone Foam and Silicone Sponge Gasket Tapes – most are available in 2 weeks.
• PORON® Cellular Urethane Foam (12 business days for stock shipments of all grades) and NORSEAL® Silicone Rubber Products are available in many grades – Contact us for details on product specific lead-times.
• Specialty Silicone Products (SSP) – we have a variety of high purity HCR, electrically conductive elastomers, solid silicone and fluorosilicone either in stock or available with short lead times from SSP: 4 weeks for standard items, 8 weeks for custom grades.
• Custom Molded Applications – lead-times reduced to 8 weeks.

– Tom Rimel
President, Stockwell Elastomerics

Contact a Stockwell Elastomerics Application Engineer for assistance with demanding applications and high performance device design and build.

PORON® is a registered trademark of Rogers Corporation.
NORSEAL® is a registered trademark of Saint-Gobain.