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.

Dimensional Innovations

This Thursday we had the privilege of going to visit Dimensional Innovations. They have been around since the mid 90's, when they primarily did work for theaters.  Today, their clientele has expanded tremendously through custom manufacturing.

DI is definitely a true innovator when it comes to bridging the gap between design and engineering.  All areas of DI work seamlessly to produce one of a kind creations for each client they work with.  The main benefit of DI is that all work is done in-house, except for some machining jobs. This allows for cheaper products, less build time, increased communication skills, and overall improved products.

Typical fabrication materials consist of aluminum, acrylics, polycarbonates, and more; most of which are machined in-house.  I was impressed upon learning that they have custom designed machines specifically manufactured for their patented processes, along with the expansive machining section of the facility.

This work setting is the type of place that I could see myself working at.  I tend to be the type of person who tries to be on top of everything constantly, and I think this work scenario would be right up my alley.

 Fabrication of a modern chandelier.

This is the display stand that will hold one of Toyota's new cars, also displaying their new slogan.
(I know it at you don't)

Mardis Gras: Made in China

It is safe to say that one of America's biggest parties is the Mardis Gras festival held each year in New Orleans. If you are familiar with this festival, you are familiar with the beads that are exchanged for partial nudity.  Most people fail to see where the beads come from. These beads although rather cheap and simple, are manufactured manually and produced on a large scale.

The beads come from China, and are manufactured in work-camp type scenarios by people who will work to complete a quota for around 14 hours straight.  They eat, sleep, and work in these factories 300 days out of the year, only leaving on Sundays and for the Chinese new year.

Although the workers are there by choice, the conditions are kind of terrible. Ten people to a room with five beds, cafeteria style meals each day, shared showers/bathrooms are among the few things they deal with each day.  The beads are composed of polyethylene and polystyrene.  Polystyrene is also a carcinogenic.  The factories are not well ventilated so toxins are constantly inhaled by most, if not all workers.

I believe if that the workers are there by choice, the people in charge of the factories need to step up their game when it comes to working conditions. Although the money the factory makes isn't on such a grand scale as the US, but pay the workers real wages for the work they do, and keep them safe.

Droid X Dissection

As our class has been studying the effects of E-waste on the world, we found it necessary to dissect the most common form of technology today: the cell phone.  Traditionally I keep all of the cellphones I have put in use, and I destroy the ones that I didn't like.  Fortunately, I kept my old Motorola Droid X, now outdated but still useful.

As I disassembled the specimen, I was interested in seeing that very little (if any) glue was used in the construction of the phone. Through our research, we learned that glue used in the technology manufacturing field is very toxic, and is rather carcinogenic.  This Droid was held primarily held together with screws of various sizes, which allows me to think that some of the phones on the market are built for deconstruction.

All together, there were six primary layers of the phone which includes the:

• screen cover which covers...
• the screen itself which rests on... 
• the chassis that holds the...
• motherboard, protected by...
• the back cover.

Sketches of Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry is one of the most inspiring people in todays realm of architectural design. I have seen the autobiography called "Sketches of Frank Gehry" multiple times. The first time I saw this film was in Mr. Allen's humanitities class, and it actually helped me understand what I wanted to do with my life.  Prior to seeing this video, I had thought i wanted to be a businessman like my father.  Obviously, after seeing this enlightening video, I had realized that this choice would not suit me best.

In Highschool, I was a CAD junkie. I spent all of my time in the CAD room hand-drafting, model making or doing computer modeling.  I never even thought that I could do this for  a living until I saw Sketches of Frank Gehry for the first time.  It made me realize that I should do architecture, after all, I had been doing work like this for the last four years.

Since I already been accepted into the University of Kansas business school, I had to fly to KU and present my portfolio to the dean of architecture, who proceeded to tell me that he loved my portfolio, but he didn't think I should be an architect.  My heart dropped and I figured I had just wasted two or three days for nothing.  Then he said that he is going to call Brian Hanabury of the Industrial Design department, and he pushed me out of his office to talk to him.

I met with Hanabury and he enjoyed my work, so he told me to submit a portfolio to the design department.  Needless to say, I was accepted to the ID program solely due to the "Sketches of Frank Gehry".

Zahner

For over 115 years Zahner has pioneered the architectural metal industry by applying aerospace engineering to the fabrication of art and architecture. Zahner is internationally renowned for intelligent engineering and precision craftsmanship on buildings throughout the world. The museum-level craft and engineering that Zahner consistently provides can be found in the Americas, Europe, Asia & the Middle East. (source:www.azahner.com)

This past week our Materials class had the privilege of experiencing Zahner's shop settings. Zahner usually has clients that are architects that want to have free-form/flowing buildings that require extreme engineering efforts. The client that I am most impressed by is Frank Gehry, whom Zahner helped produce his pavilion in Millenium Park, in Chicago. Seeing this sculpted pavilion every day produced endless questions for me to ponder, now I know some of the answers.

Zahners' primary materiall choices consist of copper, steel, aluminum, stainless, titanium, and certain types of infused steels.  More recently, Zahner has been experimenting with newer materials like copper infused glass, and other glass materials.  

With the current age of technology, most of Zahner's processes require CAD modeling, and CAM to produce a lot of the pieces that we see in the world today.  Most of Zahner's tooling is multi-functional, which allows Zahner to produce product more cost effective and efficiently. Although a considerable amount of processes are accomplished with the use of multi-functional robotic technology, some techniques are too intricate for them, requiring humans to step in and complete the job.