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PORTUGAL
General Manager Joaquim Seiça with plant manager Joaquim Gruel
Seiça – Consolidated and Ready to Build
Marinha Grande is an industrial town near the coast in central Portugal. It used to be the centre of the glass manufacturing industry and still houses elements of that era. Today, it is a growing, modern town with a booming industrial zone, home to rubber manufacturer EIB. However, on the approach to the industrial zone sits a large Euromaster outlet, which is operated by Seiça and holds the office and hides the Seiça retread factory.
Seiça is a survivor. As the retread sector in Portugal contracted and rationalised, Seiça has held its ground, perhaps seeing the impact of the same contractions as its erstwhile competitors, but through better management, better quality and perhaps just being good at what they do, Seiça has become one of Portugal’s key retreaders with a focus on fleet tyre management as the backbone to its success. Manager, Joaquim Manuel Seiça led a tour of the plant. Like many
One of the eight press carousels used on car and 4x4 tyre retreading
Portuguese retreaders, the company still produces car, light truck and 4x4 tyres alongside the bulk market of truck tyres. The car, light truck and 4x4 operations are obviously all exclusively hot cure, truck and bus tyres are a mix of hot cure and precure. The mix across the plant is roughly 50/50 hot and precure, 90 per cent of the hot cure is passenger, light truck and 4x4, whilst almost 90 per cent of truck and bus is precure. The company also retreads earthmover tyres up to 26.5 by hot cure and up to 3 metres by precure. There is also some agricultural retreading at the plant as well.
The process for every truck tyre coming into the plant is the same, the casing is manually inspected, passed through SDS shearography, given a bar code and then sent for buffing. The line splits for hot and precure after skiving. Hot cure naturally come out of the moulds with Seiça branding, but precure can also come with Seiça branding through bead to bead precure retreading using a sidewall laminate and a matrix to imprint the tyre data and branding. After curing, the tyres undergo pressure checking and trimming.
Seiça used to be a Recamic retreader, but the arrangement was