Will trusses will be part of new American homes in the future? That question has been the reason I keep a close eye on the home built for NAHB’s International Builders Show. Since 1984, this off-site exhibit, “The New American Home” (TNAH), has presented the latest innovations...

Innovation in the structural building components industry does not always come from sweeping, disruptive change. Often, it begins with practical ideas, incremental improvements, and solutions born directly from jobsite challenges. The SBCA Innovation Grant is designed to bring those ideas...

Jerry Koskovich, inventor of the first robotically controlled truss equipment, passed away March 17, 2026. Jerry was a singularly gifted entrepreneur who started from scratch in the truss industry as a TPI QC inspector in Minnesota in 1973. While doing his inspections on the shop floor in many...

Wood was not held in high regard in the truss drafting department where I began working. Our fabricator customers often wanted their trusses designed with “old lumber,” meaning the obsolete size of 1-5/8” x 3-5/8”, even though the 1.5” x 3.5” size had been in...

Few, if any, pieces of wood will pass the scrutiny of an 8’ level, and the superintendent of Bill Milburn’s homes in Texas wielded his level like a weapon. When I walked those houses, I needed a level, plumb line, string line, and more. Today, I have some of the same capabilities in...

You could say that Carol Sanford flipped the script on machinery, like he had in so many circumstances throughout his career. In the 1950s, when he couldn’t sell his modular homes in Ohio, he shipped them to Florida. When he couldn’t sell them there, he turned to selling site-built...

When I was notified we’d been selected by Construction Tech Review as the Cloud-Based Lumber Purchasing Platform of the Year 2026, I was very surprised, and I hadn’t even known we were nominated. But, as I thought about this news, I realized how grateful I am for the trust and...

The name “Bill McAlpine” has such resonance in the component industry that when ITW acquired the company and removed his name, they soon found value in returning to the Alpine moniker. There are many reasons McAlpine earned that singular honor, but one of the least recognized is...

As housing demand accelerated in the 1960s, builders increasingly turned to trusses. But, lacking better equipment, truss shops had trouble scaling up to fill their orders. Early shops had little more than radial arm saws to cut members and wood tables to assemble them. They had exhausted every...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant concept—it’s here, and it’s reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace. For component manufacturers, AI promises efficiency, speed, and cost savings. For years now, we’ve been promised that one day we would be able to...