Although I worked for what is now known as the John Crane Group for many years, the story of its namesake, John Crane, was not known or, more likely, not discussed by those who knew it. The only bits of information available were a few patents and advertisements. I decided to take on the challenge of “finding” John Crane and to write a short history of his life.
I first found patents but some of those patents were granted to “John Crane” and some to “John T. Crane”. I browsed through many archived newspapers in the Chicago area. I even searched Ancestry.com and eventually found him. Along the way, I made contact with some of John Crane’s extended family who supplied me with family lore and newspaper clippings. All of this “new” (to me anyway) information has been complied into a short history of John Crane – the Person.
My story of “John Crane — the Person” has been given its own page in the History section of SealFAQs.
Yesterday I attended a crawfish boil sponsored by John Crane Inc. – my previous employer for some 28 years. It was great to visit with my former coworkers and fellow retirees. In addition to the local folks, a few John Crane engineers and salesmen came from Houston to enjoy some crawfish. There were even some executives from Morton Grove (Chicago) who joined in the fun. All total, I’d guess that there were some 400 people at the crawfish boil.
I met and enjoyed talking to the new president of John Crane, Jean Vernet. He narrates an interesting video about John Crane and seems interested in the history and culture of the seals industry. I have my fingers crossed that he will be a good leader for John Crane Inc.
Yesterday’s party reminded me of the first crawfish boil I attended. In the early ‘70s, I was a young engineer who had moved to Baton Rouge from East Texas to work at the Exxon Refinery. Although raised on the Mississippi Coast, I knew little about crawfish. In those days, Chempro (became Sealol, now part of John Crane Inc.) was an up and coming supplier of high temperature edge welded metal bellows seals – especially at Exxon. Chempro decided to have a small crawfish boil in the parking lot in front of their little office. During the course of the afternoon, there may have been 50 people in and out of the party. It was a great success.
Chempro/Sealol continued to have an annual crawfish boil for many years with each event becoming larger than the previous one. Soon the crawfish boils were getting out of hand with well over a thousand people – invited or not) attending. (OK, so after becoming part of John Crane, John Crane executive management ended the crawfish boils in 2000.)
Crawfish are cooked by dumping live crawfish into boiling water having spicy seasonings. (You learn not to eat the crawfish that are not curled up; these were dead before being dumped into the boiling water.) Usually potatoes and corn on the cob are cooked along with the crawfish in the boiling water and spices. The mix of spices range from modified commercial packages (“But I also add ….”) to the family secret recipe.
The thing about eating crawfish is that it takes (or seems to take) more energy to peel one than is gained by eating it. The edible part (for me anyway) is a small morsel in the tail of the crawfish which must be separated from the body by removing the shell. Especially for me, peeling the crawfish is a slow and tedious process. So you don’t get full by eating crawfish. You might get full by eating corn or potatoes or drinking beer but not by eating crawfish. (The John Crane crawfish boil also included white beans and jambalaya.)
And then there’s the waste. A crawfish boil might allow for two or even three pounds of crawfish for each person (depending, of course, on the invitees). However, only that small morsel is eaten. The head, claws and shell are discarded. By volume, it appears that nothing has been eaten. Trash collection, disposal (the smell is horrible after a couple of days) and lots of paper towels are a necessity at a crawfish boil – not to mention beer.
The John Crane 2018 crawfish boil was a tremendous success as far as I am concerned. I’m already looking forward for the 2019 version.
SealFAQs has been officially launched for four months now. In April, unique visitors picked up a little bit from March. Here are the statistics according to Awstats (Advanced Web Statistics).
SealFAQs had 1161 unique visitors during April and a total of 1713 visits (1.48 visits/visitor). Visitors averaged looking at 2.35 pages per visit.
Visits per day during April increased from the March average of 51 to 57 with the most visits in a day being 88 – a new record! 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, China, Canada, Great Britain and others.
Visits average about 147 seconds in duration and most visits are still for less than 30 seconds.
Access to SealFAQs via search keyphrases was up quite a bit with 10 different keyphrases including “unpressurised dual mechanical seal api plan 23 52”, “lenses for iphone” and “mechanical seal history”. The most common keyword is “seal” of course.
So, after a slight decline in March, April was a slight improvement.
We interrupt the series on cell phone documentation to gripe about Wikipedia …
Previously, I posted about editing the end face mechanical seals article on Wikipedia. Those edits are still holding as written. However, the editors at Wikipedia did not like my link back to this site so it has been removed. They said that SealFAQs was a self published blog and therefore a conflict of interest. They also removed links to SealFAQs that I’d placed in a few other articles. Surprisingly, they allowed a link to a commercial seal distributor!
Not my day at Wikipedia. Unrelated to mechanical seals, I had created an article about my great, great, great grandfather, William Calmes Buck who was a noted Baptist preacher in the 1800s. My submission was declined on the basis that, as a relative, I had a conflict of interest. They also did not like that I used his memoirs as a major reference. The article is still on Wikipedia but as a draft. I’ve appealed and am modifying the references as requested but expect it will not be acceptable.
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.
End Face Mechanical Seals and related technologies
