Seco Tools AB

Development

The hard metal was developed in 1929 within Fagersta Bruk AB. In 1968 the manufacturing of milling inserts was moved to the daily premises. In connection with this the company called Seco Tools AB was founded. In the old premises at Holmen they fabricate carbides and they even had some premises to experiments there.

When Seco was a newly started company they had about 200 employees and now 40 years later there are about 4,000 working for Seco Tools AB. And there is no doubt that the company has been very successful as the years has gone by. One example is that they have improved their production from 0.3 million inserts/week with few operations to 1 million/week, with many advanced operations.

Organisation

Seco is a global company with many subsidiaries. They have their main plant in Fagersta and they also have their production in Arboga (holders) and in Norrkoping (drilling).

Turnover

Now (2007) Seco’s turnover is 5.5 billion.

Milling

The insert production is like this:

At first the insert is pressed and it means that the powder is filled into a form and two punches press the powder together.
Then they are sintered. There they get their strength. They warm up the plates to approximately 1500° C degrees at which the cobalt melt and surround the tungsten carbide grains. When the inserts cool they shrink by about 50% (about 17-18% in length and width)
Then they grind the flatness. The planning area will be ground so the area is in level.
Periphery grinding. It makes the shape.
Then they prepare the edge. It means that the cutting edge is rounding off because it is to frail when it is untreated.
Coating is the last step in the insert production. With coating means that they coat the insert with a wear resistant material through PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition) or with CVD (Chemical Vapour Deposition). When they use CVD different gases react with each other at a high temperature between 800-1000°C and deposit on the inserts. The thickness when they use CVD is 3-21µm and by using PVD 1-4µm.
Lastly they inspect the inserts. They look at the inserts to see if they are damaged. If they are OK, they pack them into boxes and sell them.

Milling inserts are made for milling of different sorts: face milling and square sholder milling.

To produce milling inserts demand in many cases advanced periphery grinding machines. Such a machine costs about 5 million SEK

Impact on our daily lives

The Seco Tool’s inserts versatility helps meet the customer demands by allowing more freedom in their work. When buying a Seco tools milling cutter you get both the cutter and the milling tool, allowing you to change between three different cutters that all fit the same milling tool thus you save time when changing between tasks.

The inserts from Seco Tools are used by manufacturing industries within different branches e.g. in the airplane industry, car industry or in the manufacturing of machines.

They affect the human daily life so much as different consumer goods can be manufactured with the help of the tools that Seco Tools makes.

Impact on the environment

The production influence the environment in that way that natural assets expend (raw material to the hard metal and to the steel in the tools) and the energy expending for the production, electricity to the machines and to the ovens and gases to different process. Seco Tools is environment certificated according to ISO14000 Global, which means they have a collected environment work for all their manufacture units all over the world.

Seco Tools is constantly trying to look over machines and processes to reduce the energy and the use of the raw materials. Among other things they have a contract with their supplier so they send powder and hard metal scrap to them and they recycle raw material out of this, and they buy it back. This way they use less raw material. In their product development they strive to make their products more efficient so their customers can reduce the use of inserts or get a more effective usage. Then it can diminish their energy usage.