Developed by Weyerhaeuser

Weyerhaeuser is a Fortune 500 company and is one of the largest forest products companies in the world with annual sales in 1998 of nearly US$11 billion. In addition to producing a broad range of solid wood products, Weyerhaeuser is a major producer of pulp, newsprint, paper and packaging materials, including coated paper. Weyerhaeuser has one of the most extensive R&D programs in the forest products industry.

Weyerhaeuser entered the coated paper business in the early 1980s. They purchased a pilot coater for product development, but quickly learned that operating a this equipment was expensive in terms of both materials and labor. They also found that it had to be used almost weekly so that the crew would remain proficient.

This realization led to a search for a more cost effective way to develop new coating formulations and, at the same time, be able to respond quickly to changing circumstances. This effort resulted in the development of the first CLC in 1983. At that time there were no plans to make the CLC available to others.

The CLC development team involved many highly skilled specialists from Weyerhaeuser R&D. Coating scientists were involved to set the requirements for what the CLC needed to do. Process engineers from Weyerhaeuser worked to assure that the CLC would in fact emulate commercial coating. Then these engineers joined with highly skilled design and manufacturing engineers from Automated Systems of Tacoma (AST), a well respected designer and manufacturer of sophisticated process equipment, to assure that the CLC would be reliable, durable and above all safe and easy for the for the operator to use. The latest in controls technology was incorporated to assure repeatability of the results. AST produced the first production model, the new CLC-6000, all the added options and manufactured all the 52 CLCs in operation today.