Six decades of partnership, practical innovation, and growth: That is the legacy Alpine® celebrates as it marks its 60th anniversary. Turning the big 6-0 is something that hits some people hard, while others consider themselves lucky to reach that milestone. But a business in a competitive...

A quiet and unassuming man, John Houlihan was ushered into our business by the charismatic Dave Chambers, and together they built the foundation for today’s labor management practices. It helped that Chambers’ plant, Imperial Components, was close to the site of the Hawthorne Study,...

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...

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...

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...

In 2013, I launched LimTek Solutions with a clear mission: to promote, market, and sell Enventek’s groundbreaking truss manufacturing technology, first developed in 2007. For over a decade, it’s been full steam ahead and we have cultivated an impressive Feed the Beast! customer base....

A great American competitive struggle broke out in truss shops around Miami in 1957. The owners of these shops learned that two new plates had hit the market, and both worked without supplementary nailing. The Sanford Grip-Plate that they were using required hundreds of nails to be hammered into...

The news of trusses being built with newfangled plates was so well received that it raced across the country in the late 1950s. The first to take notice were homebuilders who built with stick framing, who then wanted to try trusses. The first to respond were lumberyards, who were well positioned...

Almost two years ago, the MSR Lumber Producers Council (MSRLPC) Board of Directors got serious about putting together a comprehensive timeline for the history of the MSR lumber industry. In their experience, it was one of the few topics that, when Googled, came up short on information. Even...

Before there were truss machines, how did fabricators press plates? They were able to use hammers and nails on the Grip-Plate, but when they started using the plates that didn’t need extra nailing, they had a nearly impossible time getting them pressed. When they went to their local...