El Dorado Inc.

El Dorado is located in downtown Kansas City.  Fabrication is their primary source of employment. They focus their fabrication on a large scale, aiming for residential, condominiums, and high-rises.
They work with a lot of tube steel, using MIG and TIG welders to showcase their immaculate craft.  Most of this fabrication takes place in their shop located below their offices. This shop is a 'high-output' shop, meaning that they can handle a pretty substantial work load.  Objects/ projects that get too large are outsourced, or materials to be galvanized are outsourced as well.

Although El Dorado is known for being cohesive throughout their entire design process, each client comes with different intent. El Dorado's ability to use their philosophies to benefit others is what sets them apart from the competition.

Lawrence Paper Company

The Lawrence Paper Company has been around since 1882, and is located only 5 minutes away from KU campus.  Last week, we were able to go behind the scenes with our Materials&Processes class. While we were there, we saw many things like state of the art, multi-million dollar manufacturing equipment. One of these box making machines is able to produce an entire production run in as little as an hour (depending on order quantity)

What I found to be the most fascinating part of our tour was when we walked through the die-making room.  From my experience during my freshman year internship, I had only designed flat dies, where as the standard at LPC is a semi-circle cutting head. I was also impressed that these dies are traditionally assembled by hand because many of the dies I designed were cut using CAD/CAM and other tooling methods.

 These are the dies in storage.
When in use, these are mounted on rotating cylinders.

 These are huge rolls of paper varying in weight from one to several tons.
Market price per ton is around $550.

Large paper roller.