Celebrating a Great Year on the Swagelok Northern California Blog

New Year's Day has come and gone, but we wanted to do one last bit of celebrating before we turn our full attention to 2016. That's because we presented so many good blog posts in 2015 that we wanted to make sure you didn't miss the highlights. View all blog posts here »

New products and services

• We've been beefing up the inventory at Swagelok Northern California. First there's a new line of DPX and DFX diaphragm valves with replaceable seats. It offers a big advantage over other valve models that have replaceable seat designs that require seats big enough to manipulate by hand, making the seats more susceptible to swelling from chemical interaction or high temperature.
• We also introduced the Tube Fitter's Toolbox, a convenient way to keep all your tube bending and tube fitting tools in one place, protected and easy to grab. We designed the case at Swagelok Northern California. It has proved so popular that other Swagelok Sales and Service Centers have asked us to make some for them and their customers. You can buy the case empty, or full of all the tools you should need for the three most common tube sizes: 1/4, 3/8 and 1/2 inch (outside diameter) tubing.
• Swagelok's Tube Fitter's Manual has been an industry standard since 1963, but this year saw the first new edition since the 1990s. That's a big deal. And this time it's available both as a soft cover edition and as a free Internet download. The 10 chapters (and 3 appendices) cover everything from the tube fitting itself to installation, testing, valves, the hidden costs of leakage, and more.
• Our new regulator assembly program cuts through the clutter of the millions of possible configurations of regulators. If you need a very specific set of features, we can get the exact regulator you need. But if you really only need a general-purpose regulator and you need it fast, we can quickly narrow down the choices of what's in stock.

Video stars

• We're getting better at our videos. We wrapped up our very popular When Will It Burst series with a look behind the scenes. We discovered that some things don't lend themselves very well to testing in a burst chamber. But then, there's always the hard surface of the parking lot.
• Then there's William, a cartoon character who discovered how our Custom Solutions department can make life a whole lot easier for people running a commercial operation with fluid systems. If you've ever wondered how Custom Solutions work, this is an entertaining way to find out in only three minutes.
• On a more practical level, we started our Tech Clips video series. The short videos show the right way to install a tube fitting, select tubing, choose a hose, and other aspects of fluid systems. These clips are no substitute for our hands-on training seminars, but they can give you some quick insight.

Friendly faces

• We turned the spotlight on a few of the people you'll encounter here at Swagelok Northern California. The list included Customer Service Manager Markisha Greggs, who has been a primary point of contact for our customers for nearly 15 years.
• We also introduced Neil Ide, our new Custom Solutions Product Manager. In addition to building up our Custom Solutions program to handle more complex assemblies, Ide has been the brains behind several displays that give customers a hands-on demonstration of various products and assemblies that they might not have known about.
• And we introduced Bharat Shah, our new Quality & Continuous Improvement Manager. Shah says he welcomes process because likes the auditor to see how effective Shah and the Swagelok Northern California team are. But Shah is constantly looking for ways to make us better.

Awards night

• We must be doing pretty well already, though, because we received a Supplier Excellence award from Lam Research, a customer since 1980, when Lam was founded. The criteria included on-time delivery, quality, cost reduction, and several areas of flexibility and support. More than that, though, the winners stood out for their willingness to exceed performance requirements, according to Lam.
• We also are very proud to have been named one of the best places to work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times. Our president, Rod Fallow, was allowed only 10 words for his acceptance speech, and he nailed it: "Humbled, grateful, and fortunate to work with an incredible team."

2016 preview

We have big plans for 2016 including a redesign of our Swagelok Northern California blog and resources website, weekly articles on fluid system products, services, and solutions, additional Tech Clip videos, and more resources that will help you properly and cost effectively select fluid system solutions and optimize your fluid system applications.