Home Building Technology, Part XII: Plate People Proliferate

Issue #17317 - December 2025 | Page #10

By Joe Kannapell

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 joints of every truss they built. They now could choose between the Gang-Nail plate, which had long teeth that needed a press to be embedded, and the Ronel Barb-Grip plate, which had shorter teeth that could be hammered but didn’t need any extra nails. Would they remain loyal to the charismatic Sanford who ‘brought them to the ball’ or would they jump ship? Their decision rested on most of the factors that owners consider today, but one additional factor was at play that is no longer considered, namely, patent protection, which was a formidable midcentury barrier to entry.

With the rapid uptake of his Grip-Plate, Carol Sanford believed that by securing its patent, he would gain the same competitive advantages that accrued to his father, John Sanford, a successful inventor and holder of multiple patents. Carol was raised in in Canton, Ohio during its industrial heyday, and he returned there in 1954 to engage the major patent law firm of Ely, Frye, and Hamilton (now Renner Kenner LLC). Aided by their counsel, Carol applied for a Grip-Plate patent and subsequently stamped “Patent Pending #2,827,676” on his cardboard plate boxes.

To early truss shop owners, this implicit warning on plate boxes may have deterred their defection, but to Sanford’s competitors, this would have carried lesser weight. Engineers Cal Jureit of Gang-Nail and Yilmaz (Jerry) Akdoruk of Ronel knew that their inventions performed better, but they also knew that they had to prove that in court. So they both sought legal opinions. Jureit went to Washington, D.C., the home of the U.S. Patent Office, and engaged the local patent law firm of Diggins LeBlanc (now LeBlanc Diggins), and Akdoruk followed suit. Based on the advice they were given, they both took the surest route to counter Sanford’s patent by filing their own applications, Jureit in 1955 and 1956, and Akdoruk in 1957. With these applications in hand, they could at least temporarily counter Sanford’s legal rationale against changing plates. However, Sanford still was able to avert some defections by promoting the value of his huge library of engineering designs, which he had amassed during his three-year-longer tenure in the plate business. However, Sanford recognized his vulnerability and immediately embarked his company on a search for an improved plate design, an arduous process that came at an inopportune time.

Sanford was already stretched to the limit ramping up his business and taking it world-wide. Nevertheless, his urgency to invent a new plate became acute because he knew that Jureit understood plate design even better than he did. Jureit had witnessed every one of Sanford’s multiple tests to perfect his Grip-Plate, and when Sanford saw Jureit’s Gang-Nail plate, his concerns were heightened. Fortunately, the peripatetic Sanford could delegate the drudgery of developing a new plate to his new hire, Bill McAlpine, while he expanded sales.

Bill McAlpine, a Notre Dame graduate and experienced professional engineer, took the rival plates to the testing lab. There he found out how difficult it was to embed Gang-Nail’s longer teeth, while he learned that the clusters of Ronel’s short teeth could be embedded with a single hammer blow. However, when he tested their gripping strength, he found that the greater density and length of Gang-Nail’s teeth provided significantly better results. So McAlpine took an approach that combined the best features of both plates. He opted for clusters of shorter teeth, but with a much-increased density. However, he could not avoid infringing Ronel’s patent by simply improving upon gripping strength. He had to provide features that did not duplicate the claims specified in the Ronel patent, and he did just that. McAlpine conceived a design that used rectangular and not circular clusters, he oriented the teeth diagonally on the plate, and he increased the density of the clusters to provide better gripping strength. After having sample tooling made, and conducting extensive and iterative testing, McAlpine settled on a final design. He was also able to view Jureit’s patent that was granted in early 1959 before he filed a patent application in late 1959. Ronel’s patent was granted in early 1961 and McAlpine’s in late 1963.

Several months after Sanford released his new plate, he met nine more potential competitors at the July 5, 1960 meeting in Miami that resulted in the creation of the Truss Plate Institute and its new design standard, TPI-60 (see “The Development of the Truss Plate, Part VI: An Industry Established”). Even though that standard gave no hint of the extensive work that was required to develop a competitive plate design, multiple attendees decided to try. Many could take direction from plates used in their local market, as Sanford demonstrated with the similarity of his new plate to Ronel’s, but at the risk of violating someone’s patent.

Carol Sanford had set a precedent for plate producers by seeking patent protection for his first plate and then replacing that plate with a better one a few years later. Jureit and Akdoruk confirmed that approach by countering with their own patents. And when Jureit subsequently observed both Akdoruk and Sanford using thinner steel, he redesigned his Gang-Nail plate and submitted a second patent application in early 1963. In the 1960s, nearly 30 patents were issued to plate suppliers, quickening the great American competitive struggle and leading to a battle in the courts.