The Swagelok® Tube Fitting Advantage: Superior Materials

The following is an excerpt from our Swagelok® Tube Fitting Advantage Webinar hosted by our Direct Sales Representative Andy Wright. 

One of the reasons Swagelok Tube Fittings are so reliable and durable is the raw material Swagelok uses. You can have the best design and the best engineered product, but if you're not using top-of-the-line materials within your product, you may have subpar results. 

At Swagelok, we like to say everything starts with the melt. Swagelok maintains a mixture of 17% chromium and 12% nickel in its stainless steel, delivering exceptional corrosion resistance and ductility.

Swagelok is a major buyer of stainless steel. We use approved mills that are completely unique to Swagelok. In fact, Swagelok stainless steel cannot be purchased by anyone else. 

We discourage intermixing fitting hardware, partially because no other manufacturer matches the integrity of Swagelok stainless steel. We have numerous controls on our materials suppliers to maintain our stringent quality requirements. 

Our materials also undergo a tremendous amount of testing, including ultrasonic testing, to help ensure uniform tube fitting manufacturability.

Swagelok Durability

No stainless steel is completely immune from chloride stress corrosion cracking, but our material standards provide greater durability. 

Swagelok has conducted extensive testing to evaluate its stainless steel. After 700+ hours under intense conditions, 72 Swagelok nuts neither cracked nor leaked, while 43 of 110 competitive nuts cracked. During that same test, three competitive nuts leaked. 

Here's what 700+ hours of a test environment does to other stainless steels: 

With that in mind, Swagelok offers a wide array of engineered alloys to combat corrosion and ensure minimal cracking.

The Swagelok Manufacturing Process

Swagelok owns its manufacturing process from start to finish. We forge and machine, we electropolish, we weld, and we assemble. We invest heavily in the machines that we use, and we're consistently focused on minimizing and eliminating errors.

Swagelok also has a tool shop in our manufacturing center. We regularly maintain our tools to achieve our renowned super-tight tolerances. 

Our robust reliability excellence program provides traceability at all phases of the manufacturing process, enabling us to firmly stand behind our limited lifetime warranty because we can track each item.

The Swagelok Warranty

For over 70 years, our warranty has proven to be the best in the industry. If there's poor workmanship or a defective material, we'll not only replace the product, we'll also install that product.

I know personally how durable Swagelok products are because I've been involved in multiple product evaluations. Swagelok does exceptional lab analysis to find the root cause of failures.

Learn More About Our Material Difference

To learn more about the Swagelok Tube Fitting Advantage, watch our full Swagelok Tube Fitting Advantage webinar, schedule a Tube Fitting Installation training session, or download our Tube Fitting brochure.