Peter Lymn of Cemco: Adapting to the Market

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Lymn: People tend to be looking for much thinner coatings. In the early days of hot air leveling everyone wanted the same kind of thickness you got from fused tin-lead, and the challenge was always to get it thick without blocking the holes. These days it’s getting it to what people call ‘flat.’

Matties: As flat as possible.

Lymn: Our machines today are basically the same old construction as the first ones, but these days we have a cast iron front end which holds a titanium nozzle. So you can slide the nozzle out and exchange it for different nozzle designs for different work.

Matties: How many of these are in the industry, there must be hundreds by now?

Lymn: I think we've built close to a thousand. How many are still operating I don't know.

Matties: Wow.

Lymn: This one over here has just come back for a refurbish and was built, I believe, in 1989.

Matties: They are workhorses, that's for sure. So you're going to do a complete refurb on this and this is something that a customer sent to you to have redone; it's not something you purchase to resell.

Lymn: It is. It sold originally into Germany and then on to Switzerland. It’s now come back here, and then it's going to India. The customer has asked us to refurbish it and move it on to India.

Matties: Do you guys do a lot of work in India?

Lymn: We have reasonable business there; we've sold quite a few Quicksilvers into India.

Matties: What do you think of the India market? Do you see it up and coming, as many people do?

Lymn: It's not a big market for us, to be honest, because our prices are a little high (laughs), but it tends to be used equipment.

Matties: How many people do you have working at Cemco now?

Lymn: We are down to about 25 people now. I think we had about 160 at the peak.

Matties: Certainly things have changed. From a supplier’s point of view, what sort of demands are fabricators putting on you these days? Are the requirements getting tougher and tougher?

Lymn: I don't really think we've seen any real challenges from hot air leveling that we haven't been able to address, but there are less and less inquiries for it, and then on the wet processing side they all tend to be very unique processes. We're not selling mainstream stuff very much. It tends to be when somebody can't do something or they're looking to do a reel-to-reel process rather than sheet-to-sheet.

Matties: Automation obviously is a primary focus in the industry these days, especially with the type of thin materials that you're showing me. How thin was that material you showed me?

Lymn: This is 50 microns, but we've gone down to two microns. We transported 2-micron material for proof of concept.

Matties: That is quite an accomplishment.

Lymn: The touchless techniques work well with very thin materials. We've transported thin glass and thin stainless steel through the vertical and horizontal touchless systems.

Matties: Peter, I know we just kind of popped in today unannounced and I really appreciate you taking the time to share what you're doing with us. It's great to get the perspective of someone from your point of view in this industry. Anything you'd like to share with the industry that we haven't talked about?

Lymn: Well, unfortunately a lot of the things we're working on at the moment are under confidentiality agreement so I can't really tell you too much about them, but they are all around very thin printed electronic type materials for which we have several patents in place.  Touchless reel-to-reel processes are pretty much what we're working on today, apart from the odd orders for standard equipment—but they’re few and far between and tend to be one-off projects or repeat orders from customers that we've had in the past. It’s pretty hard to compete with imported Asian standard equipment.

Matties: I appreciate your time very much and it's been great to meet you. I know we've been in the industry together for 30–40 years, but this is first time to sit down and talk with you so I appreciate that.

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