Home Building Technology, Part XVI: Roller Equipment Alternatives

Issue #18322 - May 2026 | Page #10

By Joe Kannapell

It’s about time that a serious contender challenges the dominance of the roller gantry. Its life has been extended with lasers and auto-puck systems, but no upgrade so far has taken the hammer out of the hands of assemblers, its greatest drawback. The only alternative, the vertical press, had been dismissed as too slow, but now it has returned to relevance via robotics. Although we were given a preview of how a press could be automated 20 years ago, three recent systems have taken that technology to new levels and are worth contrasting.

Surprisingly, the first automated assembly system was built by Jim Urmson, leveraging his leading-edge linear saw’s success. His client, ProBuild, with the backing of a financial powerhouse, was proving the viability of his TCT robotics in delivering lumber, assembling truss members, stapling joints, and retrieving and pressing connector plates. Of his many advancements, one of the least appreciated was his method of building trusses on the fly, which minimized the assembly area’s footprint. While Urmson’s promising work was put on hold by the Great Recession, several of the features he pioneered have become part of more recently introduced systems.

In 2017, True House installed the next roller gantry alternative, Randek’s AutoEye system, which both simplified and enhanced Urmson’s methodology. In their implementation, Randek replaced robotic assembly with workers fastening truss parts together with corrugated fasteners on an auto-jigging table. What distinguishes the Randek system is the vision technology that locates truss joints, moves the pressing platten to each of them in sequence, and rotates the platten as necessary to maintain the proper plate orientation. Two additional AutoEye Systems have since been installed in Canada.

While both the TCT and the Randek system plate the truss with a press suspended from a steel beam, the Trussmatic system, installed by Menards in 2020, plates the truss with C-clamps functioning as robotic end-of-arm tools, after the truss parts are robotically assembled on a wall instead of a table. What is notable about Trussmatic is how web members are impaled upon protruding spikes on the assembly wall, to maintain their precise orientation and their proper abutment with adjacent members. When all webs are secured in place, chords are clamped tightly against them. Upon the successful implementation of Trussmatic, Menards has become an equity partner and now has installed 13 systems in their own plants. Soon, a Canadian plant near Toronto will be installing a Trussmatic system.

The most recent robotic installations combine vertical pressing of plates with conventional roller gantry embedment, supplied by House of Design (HoD) beginning in 2021. As with each of the above robotic systems, pairs of plates are retrieved robotically from magazines. What distinguishes the HoD system is the automated pre-plating of truss members with a vertical press before they reach the jig table, eliminating placement errors and over-plating. Although HoD went out of business two years ago, its technology is still being enhanced (for more information, see my Truss Tales post, “What Can We Learn from the Demise of House of Design?”).

One of the most promising HoD enhancements was underway in a Builders FirstSource plant in Texas that planned to automatically feed cut parts from saws into the pre-plating station. However, what was not addressed by HoD was properly securing web members, because they are set precariously upon the teeth of connector plates and sometimes require manual adjustment before hammering by an operator.

Other enhancements of HoD technology have been forthcoming from Sawtooth Robotics LLC, formed in July 2024 by HoD veterans Oscar Williamson and Chad Svedin. At BCMC 2025, they exhibited their Next-Gen PrePlater. They have also pioneered the use of wide-belt conveyors at The Truss Company for delivery of pre-plated parts, in lieu of robotics. This belt system delivers all pieces of a given truss in a single batch, thereby eliminating the need for sorting and sequencing saw output, which also precludes the separate handling and delivery of short pieces. To fasten the short pieces, assemblers can maintain a small stock of connector plates at their workstation and rely on an overhead video display to guide setup.

While these systems have not gained great traction, they are advancing the state of the art in several ways. Their stand-alone automated plate retrieval systems are now offered by two vendors. The 20 robotic systems currently building trusses are providing valuable data and insights. Their progress is also spurring other entities to work on further advances in truss assembly technology.

The most compelling rationale for these alternatives to the roller gantry is that the gantry does not embed plates completely and requires two additional processes: extended conveyance and a second pass through a finish roller. This runs contrary to the “do it right the first time” approach advocated by businessman and quality expert Philip B. Crosby in his 1979 book, Quality is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain. Fundamental to that approach is the inefficiency of spending time fixing, checking, and redoing work. Clearly, the HoD system requires redoing the plating and sometimes the re-jigging of joints. Randek’s AutoEye requires stapling the truss together and then re-securing joints (reworking them) downstream with truss plates. Only the Trussmatic system does it right the first time in this regard.

Another, though largely unheralded, case can be made that the gripping strength and the field performance of vertically pressed plates consistently exceed that of roller-applied plates, even without accounting for damage done by hammering. But, whether the vertical press resurgence and demonstration of its benefits will lead to it overtaking the roller gantry remains to be seen.