Flexitallic Gasket Company

Flexitallic Gasket Company of Camden, New Jersey, made spiral-wound metal gaskets for pipe flanges and other industrial joints, many of them filled with asbestos. Turner & Newall had bought it by 1971, and claims for its asbestos gaskets are now paid by the Federal-Mogul Asbestos Personal Injury Trust.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History and products

A spiral-wound gasket is made by winding a thin metal strip into a ring with a softer filler between the turns⁶. The library holds the patent record of how Flexitallic developed the design. In December 1931 Asbestos listed Patent No. 1,829,709, granted that October to Henry Bohmer, Jr., of Haddonfield, New Jersey, and assigned to Flexitallic Gasket Company of Camden, for "a gasket formed of strip metal, spirally wound."¹ Later patents assigned to the company, by Stanley S. Lippincott and William R. Price, refer back to Bohmer's patent; they describe an improved gasket of beaded metal strip wound with compressive material between the turns, and a machine for winding such gaskets under even pressure^{7, 6}. In listing the 1948 Lippincott patent, the magazine added the note "(Not asbestos),"⁸ although the patent itself names asbestos and asbestos composition among the possible filler materials⁷.

The trademark records filed with two of the company's labels and advertisements in the library give first use in commerce as November 15, 1911; those filed with two others give January 19, 1951³. A reorder tag in the library shows the gasket's metal as 304 stainless steel and its filler as asbestos, with the company's Camden address⁹. One Flexitallic advertisement names the company's Camden and Deer Park, Texas, locations¹⁰, and the library's product record for that advertisement notes a blue-dyed Canadian asbestos filler³. A 1986 reference book describes the company's 1953 line as "gaskets for pipe flanges, manholes, tube sheet covers with asbestos filler."²

In a customer's files

Union Carbide's records show how a large chemical maker used these gaskets. In July 1964 W. G. Ashbaugh of Union Carbide reported on failed stainless steel Flexitallic gaskets from a gas unit at the company's Brownsville, Texas, plant¹¹. He wrote that the Flexitallic catalog offered two types of asbestos in its gaskets, a Canadian asbestos compounded with some filler material and a blue African asbestos, and that a gasket ordered simply as stainless steel with asbestos filler would come with 304 stainless and the Canadian asbestos: "This is the standard run-of-the-mill gasket."¹¹ He recommended the blue African asbestos for the hot parts of that unit¹¹. A 1963 Union Carbide survey of plastics in its plants noted that many Flexitallic gaskets there were used with a Teflon filler at high temperatures or for extreme solvent exposures¹².

Under Turner & Newall

In August 1971 Asbestos, in an account of Turner & Newall's year, reported that during the year T&N had acquired Flexitallic Gasket Company and Flexitallic Company, makers of specialized industrial gaskets with headquarters in Camden⁴. In March 1976 the magazine reported that Flexitallic had bought Gasketfab Inc., a Los Angeles maker of metal-jacketed gaskets, to serve West Coast refineries, and described Flexitallic as the main supplier of spiral-wound gaskets in the United States, from plants in Camden and Deer Park, Texas, and as a subsidiary of Engineering Components, a Turner & Newall company¹³. In January 1976 the magazine reported that T&N, through Flexitallic, had taken a 49 percent interest in a new Venezuelan gasket firm¹⁴. In May 1978 it reported that T&N had taken a 50 percent share in Flexitallic Iberica, a new gasket maker in Spain, with T&N's interest managed by Engineering Components, the subsidiary responsible for Flexitallic's worldwide operations¹⁵.

Lawsuits

Flexitallic was named as a defendant in asbestos suits from at least 1981, when plaintiffs in a Mississippi case, Wedgeworth and Hart v. Armstrong Cork, served it with interrogatories¹⁶. The library's case-law collection holds six decisions naming it, from 1993 to 2002¹⁷. The program for a 1986 Valve Manufacturers Association seminar in Houston on substitutes for asbestos gaskets and packing also names the company¹⁸.

Bankruptcy and trust

Federal-Mogul, an American auto-parts company that had taken on Turner & Newall's asbestos liabilities, filed for Chapter 11 in October 2001; its 2007 reorganization created the Federal-Mogul Asbestos Personal Injury Trust⁵. Flexitallic claims are paid from the trust's T&N subfund as paper claims, on a set schedule⁵.

References

1. Asbestos, December 1931, p. 56
2. Flextallic (Flexitallic Gasket), product page, citing Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, Volume Two (1986), p. 79
3. Flexatallic (Flexatalic Gasket Corp.), product page, citing the U.S. Patent Office trademark file
4. Asbestos, August 1971, p. 50
5. Asbestos Gasket Trust Claims: Flexitallic, Fel-Pro, and Vellumoid
6. Method and Machine for Winding Composite Gaskets (US Patent 2,475,856, 1949), p. 9
7. Spirally Wound Gasket (US Patent 2,457,694, 1948), p. 2
8. Asbestos, February 1949, p. 50
9. Label: Flexitallic blue spiral wound flanged joint gasket tag (Flexitallic Gasket Co. Inc.)
10. Advertisement: Flexitallic Spiral-Wound Gaskets, "Problem-Solving Experience" (Flexitallic Gasket Company, Inc.)
11. W. G. Ashbaugh to D. A. Bernard on Failure of Spiral Wound Gaskets in the H Gas Unit (1964), UC-939, pp. 1–2
12. L. S. VanDelinder Memorandum on the Use of Plastics in Chemical Process Applications (1963), UC-2407, p. 14
13. Asbestos, March 1976, p. 14
14. Asbestos, January 1976, p. 36
15. Asbestos, May 1978, p. 8
16. Wedgeworth and Hart v. Armstrong Cork, Plaintiffs' Interrogatories to the Defendants (1981), p. 1
17. Flexitallic Gasket Company, company page: court cases
18. Valve Manufacturers Association Program for the Asbestos Substitute Gasket & Packing Materials Seminar, Houston (1986), UC-4046

Asbestos products

1 product our documents name Flexitallic Gasket Company as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Flextallic (Flexitallic Gasket)

Court cases

6 court decisions in our case-law library name Flexitallic Gasket Company as a defendant, newest first.

• Wilson v. AP Green Industries, Inc. (2002)
• Harder v. ACandS (1999)
• Harder v. ACandS, Inc. (1998)
• Baumgart v. Keene Bldg. Products Corp. (1995)
• Higgins v. Owens-Corning Fiberglas (1995)
• Angelo v. Armstrong World Industries, Inc. (1993)

In our library

5 documents in our library name Flexitallic Gasket Company, by collection.

Other library documents (5)

• Advertisement: 'There's Something NEW in Gaskets' Flexitallic gasket (Flexitallic Gasket Company) (1951) (publisher)
• Advertisement: Flexitallic Spiral-Wound Gaskets, "Problem-Solving Experience" (Flexitallic Gasket Company, Inc.) (1911) (publisher)
• Label: Flexitallic Blue Spiral Wound Flanged Joint Type Gaskets (Flexitallic Gasket Co.) (publisher)
• Label: Flexitallic Blue spiral wound gasket (Flexitallic Gasket Co.) (1951) (publisher)
• Label: Flexitallic blue spiral wound flanged joint gasket tag (Flexitallic Gasket Co. Inc.) (1911) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

Flexitallic Gasket Company is named in 4 Union Carbide documents dated 1976 to 1986 (4 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. 3 of them are published in our collection.

• North American Asbestos Corporation Transmittal of Textile and Fiber Customer Lists, 1954-1975 (1976) UC-1118 (mentioned)
• Valve Manufacturers Association Program for the Asbestos Substitute Gasket & Packing Materials Seminar, Houston (1986) UC-4046 (mentioned)
• Union Carbide's Responses to Plaintiffs' Set No. 46 Interrogatories on Asbestos Exports and Imports at the Ports of Stockton and Sacramento (undated) UC-5327 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Flexitallic Gasket Company, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Flexitallic Gasket · Flexitallic Gasket Co., Inc · Flexitallic Gasket Co. Inc. · Flexitallic Gasket Co..

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Flexitallic Gasket Company, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.