Introducing: Rado Celebrates Four Decades Of Ceramic With The Integral 40-Year Anniversary Edition

Rado uses two processes to form its ceramic cases—pressing, where ceramic powder is pressed at extremely high pressures to form the initial shape, which is then sintered at extremely high temperatures. But for more complex geometries, injection molding is used. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me, as it was hard to wrap my mind around how you could even possibly injection-mold ceramic. 

Turns out, ceramic powders are actually mixed with a plastic compound that acts as a carrier agent, and this slurry is then injected into molds at extremely high pressure (around 1,000 bar). After the shape inside the mold is cooled, a debinding process occurs where that plastic compound is essentially dissolved, and then the remaining pure ceramic pieces get sintered. There is, of course, major shrinkage that occurs at this step, which means that things like molds have to be designed to accommodate for the size decrease.