Home Building Technology, Part XIII: Truss Equipment Proliferates

Issue #18318 - January 2026 | Page #10

By Joe Kannapell

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 means short of better equipment to improve production, such as single-cutting webs and maintaining stocks of the most common truss parts. Common trusses also served as templates for repetitive orders (examples of which I observed hanging from the ceiling in one old shop). But, as more houses were converted from stick framing, the need for labor-saving equipment became paramount.

Early plants had to prove that the accuracy of their trusses equaled that of rafters cut to fit onsite. It meant maintaining consistent heel heights and seat cuts on low-pitched chords with long scarfs, while carefully monitoring the quality of incoming lumber. It also required durable saws that would maintain their accuracy making thousands of cuts daily. Fortunately, early shops had access to cutting equipment that was time tested in the west coast’s timber industry, such as the industrial-grade Mooradian saw, named after its inventor, George Mooradian. While that saw had become the dominant industrial-grade radial saw of the 1940s, it needed significant adaptation to efficiently handle truss member cutting. One firm, Speed Cut Inc., took on that task, although it was hindered by a patent that protected the Mooradian saw until 1964. Two other firms, Idaco and Clary, determined that a single blade was not enough to power a truss operation. All three of these firms were blessed with key leaders who created the first generation of truss cutting equipment, some of which still works in truss plants sixty years later. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.]

Speed Cut Inc. was formed in Corvallis, OR in 1962 to leverage sales of a time-saving length-measuring device. This hand-crank-operated mechanism, with one-foot-on-center stops, locked in the cut length of a board and could be added upstream of the Mooradian or any other pull-saw. In 1965, after the Mooradian patent expired, Speed Cut combined a good imitation of the Mooradian with their measuring device and christened the combined entity as the Metra-Cut Saw. Then in 1971, they added the turntable, which was targeted specifically for truss cutting. Wayne Roberts later assumed ownership of Speed Cut, where he continued to foster innovation.

Idaco Engineering & Equipment Co. was organized in Oakland, CA in 1943 and, after a decade building sawmill and woodworking equipment, was asked by its parent company to find a better way to precut lumber for its homebuilder customers. To expedite this task, Idaco’s GM, Gene Woloveke, created one of the first four-bladed saws. In 1961, when Carol Sanford contracted with Idaco to stamp his plates, Sanford began referring his plate customers to Woloveke for cutting equipment. From there, Idaco’s component saw business expanded rapidly. Later in the 1960s, Idaco introduced its Universal Component Cutter, which was said to operate with saw blades that moved into and out of the cut, like an automated radial arm saw. As a complement to this chord saw, Idaco also released the first four-bladed manually operated web saw, known as a swing saw. Finally in 1971, Woloveke and Marvin Thompson created the Idaco Compon-a-matic Saw, which became a mainstay of truss plants in the subsequent two decades.

Clary Corporation, a Texas subsidiary of a California company, began selling four-bladed saws in the late 1950s, relying on the inventive genius of George Mayo. His 1961 Clary Craftmaster design set the standard for features that endure today, including the rack that guides the traverse of the movable head, the square tube that drives the lumber conveyor, the lumber hold-downs, and the saw motor quadrants, among others. In 1963, Mayo incorporated the pantograph in the Craftmaster, an amazing mechanism borrowed from antiquity, that fixed the centerline of cuts as the saw blades were angulated. Eventually, Mayo achieved eight more patents that would enhance nearly all facets of truss production.

All three of these inventions provided accurate cutting, but their biggest contribution was their superior mechanical design. Idaco gained its reliability through a decade of design iterations, including the unconventional and unsuccessful design of its Universal Component Cutter. However, these steps led to the very solid and reliable workhouse Compon-a-matic Saw. The Clary design came from the amazing mechanical engineering expertise of George Mayo, one of our industry’s most prolific but unheralded innovators. Speed Cut borrowed a time-tested design and added equally durable truss-specific refinements that put the Metra-Cut in more plants than any other saw. It is a testament to the success of these three firms that, over two decades, they had surprisingly few challengers, a situation that did not change until one of them broke ranks and introduced a game changing saw…