Company History
About Athena-SCE, Inc
Good Things
Start in a Garage
Born of a need to supply their own racing engines, my father Ryan and grandfather Dan Hunter laid the foundation for SCE Gaskets in Lancaster, California in April 1990. Initially focused on copper head gaskets for drag racing, Ryan applied his ingenuity to racing engine sealing, creating new and patented products and categories such as Pro-Copper embossed exhaust gaskets, Titan Self-Sealing copper head gaskets, and ICS copper head gaskets with built-in o-rings. SCE’s product offering quickly grew to include all types of engine gaskets and seals “from the hat to the pan”. Building on our racing heritage, the SCE Gaskets brand went international, gaining distribution through premier wholesale warehouse partners across the United States, Canada, and Australia. In 2011, our family acquired a gasket manufacturing operation in Spencer, Iowa which further diversified the company’s products and customers to include Marine, Industrial, Agricultural, Antique and OE Replacement.
In 2015, we began the search for a location to consolidate our California and Iowa operations for improved production and logistics. In 2017 we selected the picturesque small town of Mount Pleasant, Tennessee as the company’s permanent home — about one hour southwest of Nashville.
New Horizons
Strategic Partnership
While the SCE Gaskets brand was firmly established as a leader in quality, SCE needed access to new & rapidly advancing gasket technologies. Athena, a prominent global manufacturer and technology leader, desired increased access to the American marketplace with a US manufacturing presence. Having already known each other from previous joint projects and sharing a similar family business culture, we began to explore a partnership in early 2017.
Athena S.p.A., located in northern Italy, was founded by Giovanni Mancassola in 1973 as a small artisan manufacturer of industrial gaskets. Today, the company boasts an employee force of over 800 with a worldwide presence, yet remains under the ownership and guidance of its founder and his family.
In May of 2018, the Mancassola and Hunter families launched a new partnership, Athena‑SCE, Inc. Under this new corporate umbrella, the SCE Gaskets brand is now unrivaled in its range of performance engine sealing solutions.
SCE has raised the bar for cylinder head sealing performance and consistency. Our new Gas-Stopper enhancement to MLS Spartan head gaskets is an example of superior design, tooling and processes. Our exclusive Vulcan Cut-Ring head gaskets are also an industry first: superb in strength, simplicity and ease of use.
Vulcan Cut-Ring reliably seals hyper-boosted, street-driven and competition liquid cooled engines. Also introduced in this catalog, SCE Gaskets has expanded its offerings to include all popular European and Japanese performance engines.
Stay tuned, our future is bright.