After Cal Jureit’s impressive debut at the 1958 NAHB Show, lumberyards and builders across America were anxious to start trussing, but they encountered several obstacles. Their deluge of inquiries couldn’t all be answered, and most were far away from the South Florida source of...

Just as Trussmatic brought back hydraulic plate pressing, House of Design has resurrected pre-plating. Both practices proved themselves in the early days of our industry, but both required disciplined shop floor management, and each had limitations. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full...

Carol Sanford’s invention didn’t equal Cal Jureit’s, but he made up for it with his head start and his aggressive marketing. Sanford had filed for his patent in March 1954, two years ahead of Jureit’s September 1956 filing, and had a plate design that was relatively...

After this year’s BCMC, it’s worth considering how far our industry has progressed since we first went to a trade show. The year was 1958, and the National Association of Home Builders Show (NAHB now IBS) was the only way to reach a national audience. Fortunately, we had one...

Civil engineer Cal Jureit had moved on from wood structures to concrete foundations, but not completely. While he was engaged with the problem of building houses on Miami’s marshes near the Everglades, he had left the problem of wood connections unresolved. Perhaps his ongoing work on Dade...

Attendees at BCMC 2019 stood safely right next to an awesome gesticulating robot and became immersed in observing record-breaking truss building – virtually, that is, through a VR headset. Back then, Trussmatic robots hadn’t made it stateside, and hadn’t yet handled our crazy...

A nearly perfect confluence of circumstances combined to create the truss plate in South Florida. The wartime home-building hiatus, the post-war baby boom, and the northward (from Cuba) and southward (snowbird) migration to Florida all combined to skyrocket the demand for new housing. But what...

When $20 Billion behemoth Builders First Source (BFS) launched a robotic truss line in April, CMs were surprised that they would select House of Design (HoD)’s first truss machine, and the industry’s first robotic floor truss line. Remarkably, after just over 3 months, they’ve...

For most of history, wood structures had been constrained by their connections. Nailed or bolted joints could only carry about half of what the wood could. As a result, our most abundant natural resource went mainly into homebuilding, where spans were short and stresses were low. That began to...

Robotics showed new promise for many CMs on May 17, ironically, by borrowing from the past 60 years of truss machinery. Attendees at SBCA’s Open Quarterly Meeting in Williamsburg, VA saw video of robots feeding truss parts into auto-jigging at the plant of their largest competitor,...