Ceramic Technology and Company Growth After WW2
The company gradually diversified its lines of technical ceramics before and especially after World War II. Coors greatly expanded its product lines, reduced scrap and accelerated production with the aid of cold isostatic pressing in the 1940s, tape casting and hot isostatic pressing in the 1950s, and multilayer ceramic capacitors in the 1960s. High-alumina (85 to 99.9% Al2O3) ceramics replaced porcelain in many thermomechanical, electrical and chemical applications. Coors engineers Vlad Wolkodoff and Bob Weaver invented fully dense, glass-free 99.5+% Al2O3 ceramics in 1964, useful for many applications where porcelain is deficient. Growth in the 1970s enabled Coors to build an electronic ceramics plant east of Golden in 1970, and its first facility outside of Golden, an electronic substrate plant in Grand Junction, CO, in 1975. Coors made its first purchase of a competitor when it bought Wilbanks International Inc. (originally Far West Industrial Ceramics) of Hillsboro, OR, in 1973. Another competitor, Alumina Ceramics Inc. of Benton, AR, was acquired in 1976. Coors began making silicon carbide, silicon nitride, spinel, zirconia and several other ceramic products by the mid-1980s.
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