Marine Market Know-How

When Every Second Counts

Industry
Marine

Application / Products
Spring Energized Seals & Engineering Support

The Challenge
In the competitive world of sailboat racing teams are constantly pushing manufacturers of components use aboard to help give their team the competitive edge. One such manufacturer of high-end manual, electric and hydraulic line winches approached ERIKS with a new product development application. While they were experts in designing and manufacturing these products, as they put it “we’re not the seal experts”. The seals they required play an integral part in their new design and had to provide the maximum performance and durability over anything currently available on the market.

The Solution
Engineers from ERIKS spring energized seal team jumped at the challenge and working directly with the customers engineering team. Visiting on-site, ERIKS engineers determined several opportunities for performance improvements. The team from ERIKS proposed changing the spring type of the existing seals supplied by a competitor to the ERIKS high-performance spiral pitch spring to reduce friction and increasing durability pursuant with the customers objectives. ERIKS quickly developed prototypes and offered tool recommendations and techniques for the assembly process utilizing the new ERIKS SE Seals.

The Results The ERIKS spring energized seals were custom designed for the customers specific application and requirements, yet ERIKS designed them to fit the standard SE grooves. To add to the customers delight, the custom spring energized seals developed by ERIKS were delivered with better lead time than the competition thanks to ERIKS’ in-house manufacturing capability at the ERIKS eFab facility. The customer has been extremely pleased with the performance of the ERIKS spring energized seals and have seen sales growth of 100% per year for the last 3 years!