A graphite sealing face, held in a metal band — and every ring on this table gets checked before it ships.

These are graphite sealing rings with a machined metal insert — a graphite body held inside a steel band, laid out across the bench for inspection.

The combination is deliberate. Graphite gives you the sealing face: it is self-lubricating, it runs cool against a mating face, and it tolerates the thin-film conditions you get in a pump. But graphite alone is brittle, and a ring that has to hold a press fit or take a mechanical load cannot rely on graphite by itself. The metal band takes the structural duty — the retention, the fit, the mechanical load — while the graphite does the sealing. Two materials, one ring, each doing the job it is good at.

The hard part is not the material, it is the interface. Machining a graphite body to sit inside a metal band with the right interference, keeping the sealing face flat and clean after the insert is in place, and holding that across a production run — that is a precision job, and it is why these rings are laid out and inspected before packing rather than after.

The rings in these photos vary in diameter and cross-section, and they are machined to drawing at Lepu. They go into mechanical seals and rotating equipment as the stationary or rotating face, which is the same face pair we build into a mechanical seal for centrifugal pump and mechanical seal for water pump duty, and the same graphite we cut as mechanical seal replacement parts.

Need graphite faces or seal rings for a rebuild, or a ring you cannot source anymore? We machine graphite components, bushings for mechanical pump shaft seals, and complete mechanical seals for rotating equipment — including OEM replacement mechanical seals and OEM pump mechanical seals — from a drawing, a sample, or a used part. Send it over and we will match it.