GRAND JUNCTION — It won’t be long before this see-through acrylic tube is filled with the squeals of soaked kids on rocketing rafts. But for now, two serious men in safety glasses are squatting inside. Their noses are nearly pressed into the acrylic as they smooth out imperfections with hand-held polishers.
The tube is one of 40 that were cooked, molded and polished at the Reynolds Polymer Technology manufacturing plant in Grand Junction and are being fitted together into the giant squiggles of the AquaDuck water coasters on the decks of two new Disney Dream cruise ships.
The 765-foot-long and four-deck-high water slides are just one of the latest holy-cow projects for a company that has made a name for itself around the world by building just about any seemingly impossible record-breaking or jaw-dropping thing that developers and designers dream up.
“Chances are if you can dream it, we can build it,” the company boasts on its website, along with a solicitation for ideas that range from cocktail napkin sketches to engineered plans.
How about a three-story, 250,000-gallon aquarium with an elevator running through the middle? Reynolds has made one for a hotel in Berlin. It rated a listing in the Guinness World Records. A restaurant at the bottom of a lagoon? Reynolds made that happen in the Maldives.
The world’s largest virtual aquarium with fish and mermaid images projected on an 11-ton acrylic screen? Reynolds built that in China. A water- filled sphere that contained magician David Blaine in Lincoln Center for a week? That’s another Reynolds’ product. The clear pool sticking out from the top floor of a Dallas hotel where swimmers can paddle out and feel suspended in the air? Reynolds figured out how to make that work.
Reynolds even ventured into “outer space” by making the “transparent aluminum” that was a save-the-whales prop in the “Star Trek IV” movie.
“Nothing is too big or too crazy, said Julie Hober, marketing associate with Reynolds. “We’re pretty willing to take on just about anything.”
That just-about-anything list includes 1,600 projects in 52 countries and revenues that range from $20 million to $50 million annually. (The privately held company won’t divulge exact revenues or salary ranges).
Reynolds’ custom-made products with price tags from $100 for a small panel to several million dollars for a huge aquarium, are in zoos, casinos, malls, palaces, spas, museums, restaurants, plazas, hotels and opulent homes from Cleveland and Dubuque, Iowa, to Lithuania and Dubai.
Landlocked location
The fact that a company with this kind of reach has operated and thrived out of landlocked Grand Junction for nearly 20 years after being lured from Santa Ana, Calif., is an economic-development success story. Reynolds survived the recession with only minor scrapes because of its international clientele. The company had a temporary hiring freeze and cut back work shifts, but has added staff for a total of about 200 workers at its 75,000-square-foot factory.
Reynolds also has built smaller manufacturing facilities in Rayong Province, Thailand, and Seoul, South Korea, and employs 15 sales people around the world.
Ann Driggers, president and chief executive of the Grand Junction Economic Partnership, said Reynolds hasn’t just provided jobs, it has helped to put the city on the worldwide map.
“That’s one of the reasons why it is so important to Grand Junction,” Driggers said.
Wade King, owner of Acrylic Tank Manufacturing in Las Vegas, gives Reynolds kudos for becoming the largest acrylic-casting company in the country by devising a way to do the biggest projects. Worldwide, only two other companies — in Japan — can do similar massive projects, and they use a different technique of bonding acrylic sheets together rather than casting it.
King, whose company buys acrylic supplies from Reynolds for its smaller projects, called Reynolds “a good company that can create anything out of acrylic.”
Reynolds chief executive Roger Reynolds also has created another company. International Concept Management, housed in its own building across from Reynolds, designs and supervises construction of projects that Reynolds Polymer manufactures.
Both companies have benefited from customers wanting to one-up each other.
If a mall in one country has the world’s largest aquarium, it’s a given that a mall in another will want to build one just a tad larger or to put an elevator or a whale shark inside.
“Our projects have gotten a lot bigger,” Reynolds process-control manager Derrick Brown said as he showed off an outdoor oven that is larger than two semi trailers.
A few Colorado projects
Travel to Las Vegas is required to see a concentrated collection of Reynolds’ more eye-popping pieces. Nearly every large hotel there sports a Reynolds product, be it a 12-foot statue of a naked woman rendered in milky acrylic or a humongous shark tank with a water-slide tube that cuts through the middle.
Colorado is not a hot spot for Reynolds’ products. In Denver, Reynolds made the windows for the former Ocean Journey, now called the Downtown Aquarium and owned by Landry’s Restaurants. It has contracted to create pieces for the expansion of the Asian exhibit at the Denver Zoo and for some architectural features for a new SpringHill Suites hotel in Grand Junction.
Acrylic architectural materials are some of Reynolds’ newer products. Reynolds has developed a technique to impregnate colors or graphics into acrylic panels and tiles, and to make blocks textured and colored to look like ice. The latter product is on display at an “ice” bar in Romania. The company has added these R-Cast Mirage and R-Cast Texture product lines to its trademarked R-Cast method of casting acrylic.
The company portfolio also includes hyperbaric chambers used in medical settings, deep-sea rovers used for scientific investigation and those smooth and simple, iconic bitten-apple signs that grace all Apple facilities.
Higher on the wow-factor scale, Reynolds is completing two flight- simulator orbs that look like giant, clear beach balls sitting on the factory floor. Nearby, what looks like a slice of ocean water is actually 32,000 pounds of sea-green acrylic that is bound for a South Korean island to become part of a huge aquarium.
The biggest head-shaking piece in production is a clear acrylic box that is larger than a double-wide trailer. It was custom-ordered to keep the dust off a woman’s vintage circus carousel.
Hober said Reynolds has enough projects to keep the company and its two shifts working through the next year or two.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
Reynolds Polymer
Roger Reynolds developed the process of monolithic casting — making thick, moldable sheets of acrylic — in the early 1980s when he was working for his father at Reynolds and Taylor, a Southern California aerospace-manufacturing business.
Recognizing an unmet need for large acrylic view panels, he formed Reynolds Polymer Technology Inc., a company that is still privately held. He expanded and moved the business to Grand Junction in 1992.
Reynolds, a 50-something who doesn’t divulge his exact age, was an animal-science major at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He has a passion for animal conservation that he has been able to incorporate into his aquarium designs. His travels have taken him to six continents and more than 50 countries. Nancy Lofholm
