What I experienced at the truss industry’s first trade show was the bare bones beginning of fifty years of industry progress. But, at first glance in 1971, it didn’t seem so, as I found only a handful of 8x10 booths, tucked in the corner of the Louisville Fairgrounds. Yet plenty of roof truss machines were sold, mostly for under $20,000, mainly to lumberyard customers. At the 1972 Show, the first engineering and cutting programs were demoed on teletype machines hooked up to remote computers via the new technology of timesharing.
At these early shows, called Industrial Building Expositions (INBEX), we were lumped in with the much larger mobile/modular/manufactured housing (MH) industry. Then we were considered to be part of the truss fabrication business. This explains why the original name of Shelter Systems was “Material Fabrication, Inc.” Unfortunately, at that time, some stick framing stalwarts used an abbreviation of that name, “pre-fab” shops, to downgrade trusses.
The 1973 INBEX hit when housing starts reached a level which hasn’t been reached since, flooding us with over a million dollars of roof truss equipment sales. Shortly thereafter, however, the oil crisis tanked housing, and INBEX folded. Four years elapsed before our industry had recovered sufficiently to support another show. This turned out to be a good time to separate from the MH industry, which never recovered, even to this day. For many of us truss suppliers, it seemed logical to join the Show attended by the buyers of most trusses, namely, the National Home Builders Show. However, the truss industry booths were nearly impossible to find in the vast halls of McCormick Place in Chicago. Clearly, we needed a better venue.
By 1980, even though housing had fallen back into the doldrums, our industry had made enough inroads in the building business to justify our own Show. We returned to Louisville, but to a new downtown convention center befitting our growing success. We smartly shed the fabricator name and officially adopted the component manufacturer identity. And for the first time we were able to display truss machinery. Though a large array of roof, floor, and wall panel equipment was shown, the very first PC workstation garnered nearly as much attention. This was the Forest Products System, introduced by future Hall of Famer and founder of Shelter Systems, Lenny Sylk. This showing stimulated all suppliers to follow suit and helped turn future BCMCs into meccas of back-office software technology.
Through the 1980s, as BCMC gained in prominence, many ingenious entrepreneurs came forward with ground-breaking innovations. In 1985, Jerry Koskovich debuted the Auto Omni, the first automated component saw. In 1988, Alpine showcased AutoSet, the first automated truss setup system. In 1993, Virtek demonstrated their TrussLine laser setup system. And in 2001, Jim Urmson showed us the first linear saw. Of course, these inventions sparked many further innovations as competitors tried to “one-up” the inventor, often at the next BCMC (see next month’s Sixty Years of Machines Part XXIV for a great example). What distinguishes all the above breakthroughs is not so much the mechanics of the machines, but the onboard software technology that drives them.
This year in Omaha, we’ll see twice as many booths as were on display at the first BCMC. We’ll watch Panel Plus’s Automated Sheathing Station raise the bar on wall panel productivity alongside Triad’s latest ProFusion Sheathing Bridge with autonomous operation. We’ll also see MiTek’s Direct Drive System demonstrate the first use of sophisticated software to control multiple machines, as we watch a stick of lumber retrieved from its bunk, cut, and delivered to the table, untouched by human hands. We can count on this BCMC, and those that follow, to continue to chronicle the march of progress of this industry. And we should embrace the nuances of all this tremendous technology that uplifts our industry, raising our status in the building industry, from basic fabricator to component manufacturer to now being the masters of offsite construction technology.