There is a certain obsessive compulsive behavior that motivates some fabricators when it comes to stacking completed trusses and preparing them for shipment to the customer—but did you ever think of the benefits of tight, stacked, aligned trusses? One of the most difficult parts of a...

Compliance with ANSI/TPI 1–2014 requires maintaining member to member gaps at less than 1/4 inch. An exception would be for floor truss chord splices where the limit is 1/16 inch. Let us take a look at two different situations, the first being a roof truss and the second being a 4 x 2...

In a perfect world, our trusses smoothly flow from the assembly table to the finish roller without any problems. Each connector, on both sides of the assembly, is adequately pressed and a completed truss is the result. Unfortunately, we don’t live in this perfect environment. Stuff...

As a general rule, when you cut lumber to length, the lumber grade is unchanged. In those cases, care should be taken to transfer that grade verification along with the cut lumber. This can be done with a lumber crayon, segregation, tagging, or many other suitable ways. Ripping lumber,...

Part 4 in our TIMWOODS Series Shigeo Shingo, who is considered the world’s leading expert on manufacturing practices and the Toyota Production System, wrote “humans are animals that make mistakes.” But how often do we make mistakes in our lumber yards, millwork, and...

When you write a letter or series of paragraphs, sometimes it’s difficult to proof the very thing you just wrote. Why is that? Because you don’t approach it with a clean-slate perspective but with an expectation of what you think it says. Likewise in our industry, it’s often...

Using a 6 x 6 plate instead of a 3 x 6 plate can make the Plate Placement Method fail the polygon rule. So what is happening? And how can this be resolved? What’s Happening In the image, the yellow area represents the connector optimal placement for the designed size of a 3 x 6...

There is nothing worse than running a truss out the door and then realizing one of the truss members is broken. The question is – can I make a quick fix using a connector plate? The short answer is – no. But there are many who may not realize that specific engineering is required for...

I remember the introduction of early cruise control in cars. It was fantastic. It allowed the driver to set their speed without having to hold the accelerator pedal down with their foot. The only problem was, when you went up a hill, the car slowed down. When you went down a hill, the car...

In the photograph, the side grain is shown to provide understanding of what constitutes a knot defect when the truss member is cut perpendicular to this face. Each dark line of grain indicates an annual growth ring. In the sections marked A, the face of a sawn member would not show any knots...