The Last Word: Removing the Achilles Heel of Jigging Joe Kannapell Until recently, vertical members have been the bane of all jigging systems, whether they occur on the perimeter or the interior of trusses. And they are found more than ever on apartment and residential designs. Handling these members without human intervention has been the Achilles heel of... Read More March 2024 Issue #16296 Page 146
A Year of Building onto the Spida Family Wendy Boyd Christmas has come around so quickly – where has the year gone? Many great things have happened for Spida in 2023, so before we celebrate another Christmas and New Year, let’s reflect on our journey this year. The start of 2023 was all about planning for the year and executing... Read More December 2023 Issue #15293 Page 17
From Kiwis to Gators, Spida is Making Big Moves Wendy Boyd As we get ready to make our move to the new Spida factory in Jacksonville, Florida, a few things come to mind in terms of making the move as easy as possible and what the move means to all of us on the Spida Team. Firstly, we have stock on hand, in Shelbyville, that would be better off... Read More November 2023 Issue #15292 Page 16
Should We Follow Lasers Blindly? Glenn Traylor When GPS systems first became available for personal cars, we started hearing stories about folks turning left onto a railroad track or following a cow trail through the valley to a dead end. In 2012, three Japanese tourists in Australia drove into the Pacific Ocean after their GPS told them to.... Read More November 2023 Issue #15292 Page 33
Building on a Legacy with Eide Eide Machinery Sales Team The legacy of the Eide name runs deep. Established in 1927, Eide Saw Company was a saw blade repair and supply company in the heart of Minneapolis’ milling and lumbering industry. Over the past 96 years, however, we have grown and expanded to keep pace with the ever-changing woodworking... Read More June 2023 Issue #15287 Page 54
The Last Word: Is the Future Flat? Joe Kannapell Seeing so many flat roofs early this year made me wonder if the future of truss building will be flat. During the January SBCA Phoenix Open Quarterly Meetings, some of us saw Truss Fab Components’ yard loaded with flat trusses, and others saw the flat roof lines of Frank Lloyd... Read More March 2023 Issue #15284 Page 128
The Last Word: The Last Word on Automated Material Handling Joe Kannapell With automated saws and auto-jigging tables, what remains is automated material handling, and that’s what we find at Builders FirstSource’s (BFS) Austin plant. House of Design’s (HoD) robotic roof line there extends the floor truss pre-plating methodology found at their Atlanta... Read More December 2022 Issue #14281 Page 144
The Last Word: The Last Word on Pre-Plating Joe Kannapell Just as Trussmatic brought back hydraulic plate pressing, House of Design has resurrected pre-plating. Both practices proved themselves in the early days of our industry, but both required disciplined shop floor management, and each had limitations. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full... Read More November 2022 Issue #14280 Page 132
The Most Automated, Most Toured Truss Plant Edmond Lim, P.Eng. In my humble opinion, since 2014, United Truss of Innisfil, Ontario, Canada has unofficially held the titles of “The most automated truss plant” in North America and “The most visited truss plant in North America.” United Truss was the un-named but featured truss plant in... Read More October 2022 Issue #14279 Page 50
The Last Word: The Last Word on Totally Robotic Joe Kannapell Attendees at BCMC 2019 stood safely right next to an awesome gesticulating robot and became immersed in observing record-breaking truss building – virtually, that is, through a VR headset. Back then, Trussmatic robots hadn’t made it stateside, and hadn’t yet handled our crazy... Read More September 2022 Issue #14278 Page 130