Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Snaptron’s Tactile Metal Dome Switches

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Snaptron

Electronics & IT

Windsor, Colorado

Website: www.snaptron.com

Whether you know what they are or not, tactile metal dome switches are ubiquitous in modern life. They’re the little round switches that flex on and off in everything from videogame systems to helicopter cockpits.

Founded by the late Earl Tatman in his garage in 1990, Snaptron now makes more than 100 million tactile dome switches a year at its 44,000-square-foot plant in Windsor. The company boomed in its early years as a key supplier to a few big brands. “Jobs for the Xbox and Palm Pilot turned into really high-volume things and drove the company’s growth in the ‘90s,” says Ashley Steinbach, Snaptron’s director of strategic development.

Steinbach says the 65-employee company’s largest markets are defense, aviation, automotive and consumer electronics. “We’re fairly diverse, with a lot of different industries and applications,” she notes.

There is increasing demand for solutions that align with manufacturing automation, with rolls of switches that can be fed into pick-and-place machines. “A lot of companies have been doing SMT [surface-mount technology], which is automatic placement and using robotics and other things to automate their manufacturing processes, so we’re seeing a big uptick on our side,” Steinbach says.

Another new dome, the NC-Series, is named for an acronym for “normally closed,” Steinbach says. “Most domes that are produced are considered normally open, that they’re not making any sort of electrical contacts, whereas the [NC-Series] has a feature on it that allows it to remain in contact until it is actuated, at which point it activates another electrical point. So it’s a dual-feature switch that remains on. You kind of think of it like an emergency stop button where it’s constantly being held down.”

Colorado’s lifestyle and location are major pluses for Snaptron, as is the presence of Denver International Airport. “Having the ability to get anywhere in the U.S. is great for our sales team to really form one-on-one, day-to-day relationships with our customers,” Steinbach says. “That’s definitely been a big benefit.”

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].