Kemet skates to Olympic gold

An innovative approach to achieving a perfect 90 degree angle on his ice skates may well have made the difference between gold and silver for Dutch skater, Stefan Groothuis, in the 1,000 metre speed skating event at the recent Sochi Winter Olympics.

In a YouTube video Stefan explains how he achieves a perfect finish to his blades using Kemet’s diamond compound and a Kemet™ Tin composite plate. The process is a result of research together with the technical consultants at Kemet’s Dutch subsidiary, Kemet Europe. The company have also helped the Dutch women’s bobsleigh team to perfect the final polishing of their runners. The process also used increasingly finer grades of diamond compound applied with felt pads and cleaned between applications with Kemet CO-42 cleaning fluid.

It was an honour to work with these elite sportsmen and women, but this is quite an unusal event for Kemet, who operate mainly on a business to business level - developing and improving lapping and polishing processes for other engineering companies. A team of technical experts establish the optimum route to achieve the specified finish and make recommendations regarding the equipment and consumables needed to reproduce the process on a repeatable basis . If you have a need for our polishing expertise get your skates on and contact us.

Stefan presenting at Kemet Europe on how lapping helped produce the perfect finish to his blades

Stefan Groothuis
Stefan Groothuis Olympic Champion

Stefan Groothuis, Olympic Champion 1000m skating in Sochi 2014

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