Tag Archives: blog

API, mechanical seal, SealFAQs, Uncategorized, Wikipedia

Blogs about Mechanical Seals

A blog is a “weblog”, that is, an online journal or informational website.  Posts to a blog appear in reverse chronological order. A blog can be about anything. Many blogs are personal in nature and often are similar to a diary.  The first blogs began to show up about 1994 and were primarily text with a single author.  A blog is expected to be updated more frequently than a website and also to be somewhat less formal.  Blogs usually have a byline or author and the blog site includes the ability to find previous posts by author, date, category and tags.

A blogger is simply someone who operates a blog or blog site as opposed to someone who authors a post for a blog or website.

Blogs can generate money through sponsors and links to commercial sites; however, SealFAQs does not do this.

One problem with hosting a blog is the commitment to maintain it and to add new posts regularly.  Having neglected my own blog for several months, I’m well aware of this problem.  After a while, the newness and uniqueness of the blog sort of wears off and the blogger runs out of things to write about.  Fortunately, I have plans and topics for 2020.

Manufacturers Blogs

There are several different types of blogs.  Some seal OEMs operate a corporate blog to provide information and updates about their products.  Here are some links to OEM “blogs” that are specifically labelled blogs.

John Crane has a blog, https://resources.johncrane.com/blog/, attached to its main website, JohnCrane.com.  The Crane blog addresses a variety of subjects and appears to be somewhat irregularly updated.  The Crane blog appears to be a mix of technical articles, product announcements, news and field experience.  The author(s) name is not given.  The Crane blog began December 13, 2018.

Chesterton has a blog, https://blog.chesterton.com/, attached to its main website, Chesterton.com.  The current topic is part 4 of a series on double seals and barrier fluids; it dates to October 31, 2019.  Although good information, the overall feel is not that of a “blog”.  Apparently several authors contribute.  The Chesterton blog dates back to at least 2017.

Sepco has a blog, “Seal Connect”, at https://www.sepco.com/community/blog/, with posts by various authors dating back to July 23, 2019.

Flowserve does not appear to have a blog, as such. 

EagleBurgmann does not appear to have a blog, as such. 

Non-Manufacturers Blogs

SealFAQs is not a manufacturer sponsored blog.  There are a few other such blogs, but not many.

The Fluid Sealing Association (FSA), the International Trade Association for mechanical seals, has a blog, http://www.fluidsealing.com/mechanical-seals/mechanical-seals-blog/.  The FSA blog doesn’t feel like a conventional blog.  Posts tend to come from the various member companies of the FSA.  Many of the FSA posts were published in Pumps and Systems Magazine as part of the “Sealing Sense” series.  The most recent post was published in June 2019.

There is a relatively new blog at https://www.mechanicalseals.net/Mechanical-Seal-Blog/index.php?frontpage, with the title “Mechanical Seal Tips and Details”.  It has only three posts and has the feel of a project that was undertaken and then stopped.  However, it was off to a good start.

Seal Websites

Of course, there are other websites containing information about mechanical seals and a few use the word “blog” in their description but don’t really have the feel of a blog.

Wikipedia has a page for mechanical seals, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-face_mechanical_seal as well as a page for the seal standard, API 682, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_Standard_682.

If you are aware of other mechanical seals blogs and especially if you have a favorite mechanical seals blog, please leave a comment.

API, API 682, SealFAQs

SealFAQs statistics for June 2018

SealFAQs has now been officially launched for six months.  In June, unique visitors decreased slightly from May by about the difference in the length of the month and the fact that June had five weekends whereas May had only four.   Here are the statistics according to Awstats (Advanced Web Statistics).

SealFAQs had 1149 unique visitors during June and a total of 1847 visits (1.61 visits/visitor).  Visitors averaged looking at 4.7 pages per visit – a significant increase.  Bandwidth was up to 1.1GB.

Visits per day during June increased from the May average of 60 to 61 with the most visits in a day being 87 – twice!  As usual, most people visit during the week and the middle part of the day.

By far, the most visitors are from the United States and distantly followed by India, Russia, South Korea, Poland, China, Canada and others.

The average time of a visit has increased to 442 seconds in duration but 77% of all visits are still for less than 30 seconds.  It appears that some people are logging in and staying on the site an hour or more.

Access to SealFAQs via search keyphrases was down a little with 5 different keyphrases including “api 682”.  The most common keyword is “seal” of course.

June was a decent month for SealFAQs with some gains in viewing.

Uncategorized

The Background of SealFAQs

Shortly after learning what a mechanical seal was, and as I learned more, I began to think about writing a book on mechanical seals. At the time (early 1970s) there just didn’t seem to be much information available on the engineering aspects of mechanical seals.  I collected what information I could and, over the years, began to organize my book.  Over those same years, more and more information about mechanical seals became available – plus I found many books and articles that had been previously overlooked.

By the time I retired from John Crane Inc. at the end of 2014, there almost didn’t appear to be a need for my book on mechanical seals.  In particular, Dr. A. O. Lebeck’s book, Principles and Design of Mechanical Face Seals, is so comprehensive that there was little need for my own thoughts on mechanical seal theory.  Still, I reviewed my past publications and paper files and made plans for my own book.  It was a daunting task.  Who would publish my book?  Who would buy it?

I considered self-publishing. I had some experience with Blurb (shameless plug here for my dad’s memoirs and my own book of photographs) but then remembered that I had never received even one single dollar from Blurb.  Making money from my book on seals was not my primary objective but would have been nice.  I also considered Amazon self-publishing for a digital version of my seals book.  An Amazon ebook had considerable appeal but as I learned more, this publishing format seemed limiting, especially considering the many equations, graphs and illustrations that my book would have.  I became frustrated with the whole idea.

My frustration (and realization that there was no money to be made) inspired me to consider making a website about mechanical seals. After all, some of my friends and co-workers have been telling me for years that mechanical seals were actually a hobby for me.  I began to consider my options for making a website.  Actually, I already had a blog about my Buck family genealogy so I knew a little about making a site.  After a little research, I decided to use WordPress to develop my site and BlueHost to host the site.  I came up with the name “SealFAQs” as meaningful and unclaimed.  I outlined my site and jumped right into developing it.

My first efforts with SealFAQs were so frustrating and the results so bad that I temporarily gave up. Instead, I started a simple blog in order to learn and practice WordPress.  After a few months, I returned to working on SealFAQs in 2017.

SealFAQs is far from complete but I’ve decided to “launch” it now and continue to develop it. As a result, some (not too many though) of the site pages are blank – just a place marker.  However, these pages will be filled out in the coming months.  Also, other pages might look a bit rough but are useable and will be tidied up eventually.

Fortunately, I’ve already published so much about mechanical seals that there is a wealth of material already in the public domain from which to draw. I hope that SealFAQs will be a useful site and that you will visit it frequently.