Santa Ana Firm Hooks Contract at Aquarium
When Reynolds & Taylor Inc. went fishing for a contract for its acrylics division last year at Florida’s Disney World, the Santa Ana plastics manufacturer landed a big one.
Reynolds & Taylor, with 150 employees and 1984 sales of about $10 million, beat out the giant Mitsubishi conglomerate of Japan for a contract to produce and install the acrylic windows for a 5.7-million-gallon aquarium at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando.
Reynolds & Taylor began developing an automated process for manufacturing large acrylic windows nearly six years ago. It won the Disney contract last September with a bid of $2.2 million--even though, admits company President Roger Reynolds Jr., the 20-year-old firm had never produced anything as large as the windows needed for the Disney job. Mitsubishi’s plastics division, by comparison, has long been considered a world leader in the production of large-scale acrylics.
Roger Reynolds III, who heads the acrylics division of the company his father founded 25 years ago, said his crew produced 66 massive, curved acrylic windows for the Epcot Center aquarium, including 11 monsters that each weighed 8,000 pounds and were 8 feet tall, 27 feet long and 6 inches thick. The smallest windows, he said, were 6 feet tall, 10 feet long and 4 inches thick.
The Disney contract, Reynolds said, enabled Reynolds & Taylor to lease and equip a 22,000-square-foot facility in Santa Ana for the production of large acrylics and to hire 37 new employees and train them in the company’s techniques.
The aquarium windows are made by pouring cool liquid plastic into molds and then curing the molds in a controlled temperature for several days.
“It’s a long, tense process,” he said. “It takes seven days before you can take a look and see whether you’ve got a decent window.” Reynolds said that several windows, including one of the 11 monsters, had to be thrown out and remade because of flaws in the original castings.
Reynolds & Taylor produces a variety of plastic products for military, aerospace, medical and other commercial applications and casts large plastic pieces for architectural use. The company produced the 18-foot, 7,000-pound acrylic spire that tops LTV Corp.’s 60-story headquarters building in downtown Dallas.
