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There is a sign hanging at my local barbershop. It reads, "We give three kinds of haircuts here: good, fast, and cheap. If it is fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If it is good and cheap, it won’t be fast. And if it is good and fast, it won’t be cheap." Read more in our latest blog post.

With the recent addition of a 100,000 ft² manufacturing facility, construction is complete, and all buildings are fully operational at Dixon’s new campus located in Chestertown, MD.

Any professional who has ever had the privilege of leading a team of employees would know that his or her responsibilities transcend budgetary concerns and that keeping employees safe is job number one. This is true regardless of whether the leader is a line supervisor with two direct reports or a senior manager responsible for hundreds of employees, and it becomes especially important when any of the employees perform their jobs under hazardous conditions.

When it’s critically important to keep a gas or liquid inside a system, consider a bellows seal valve. Bellows seal valves incorporate a cylindrical metal tube that expands and contracts like an accordion to create a hermetically sealed closure in a valve stem. The bellows gets compressed when the valve is in the open position and expands when the valve is closed. Because the bellows expands and contracts as the valve is operated, and because it is welded to the stem and bonnet, there is no leak path for the gas or liquid to escape.

We offer our most sincere congratulations to Dixon employees Josh Davis, David Kelley, Michael Mench, Jake Thorn, and Steve VanCulin on their recent graduation from our first Competency-based CNC Apprenticeship!" The Apprenticeship is a 2-year program registered with Maryland and the first of its kind in the state. Launched in March of 2018 the program includes 2,000 hours of task competency and 144 hours per year of classroom-related instruction.

Is history repeating itself? Just as the horse was slowly replaced by the automobile, is the gasoline automobile slowly being replaced by the electric vehicle? Whether the electric vehicle will ever directly replace the gasoline automobile or not is debatable, but along with renewable fuels, electric vehicles will undoubtedly dilute the demand for gasoline over time as fewer and fewer gasoline-fueled automobiles are on the road. Read More

Dixon shared the exciting product solutions Dixon has for the marine market with Expo attendees.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were just over 8,000 automobiles in the United States. By 1910 that number had grown to nearly 500,000. Today there are over 285 million motor vehicles on the road. The transition from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile is an amazing story that didn’t just happen overnight. By many accounts, it took over fifty years for Americans to replace their trusted horses with the new and unfamiliar technology. Horses had been mankind’s dependable transportation for thousands of years, and many Americans believed that automobiles were unsafe.

The chlor-alkali industry is broken down into three distinct business types. Each has its own set of data, including incident reports and market tracking.

Performance plastics are made from petrochemicals, which is a broad term for chemicals made from petroleum, fossil fuels, or sometimes renewable sources like corn or sugarcane. PVC plastic—or polyvinyl, number four on our list of chlor-alkali chemicals—is a petrochemical performance plastic. PVC is made through a series of chemical reactions, one of which requires the chlor-alkali process. It starts with chlorine, which is reacted with ethylene. Ethylene, found in natural gas and crude oil, is what makes PVC a petrochemical.