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As North America’s largest lumber manufacturer, West Fraser supplies the truss market with mechanically graded lumber, dimension lumber, and premium products such as Prime, Select Structural, and HiLine. Founded nearly seven decades ago West Fraser began operations in 1955 when...

You have to go back to the Great Recession 15 years ago to find as many LBM dealers reporting sales declines as we had in 2023. But the reasons are far different, and so are the consequences. Three-quarters of the companies constituting the 2024 Construction Supply 150 reported revenue drops...

Building safety includes a wide range of best practices, including implementing fire suppression systems, conducting regular inspections on existing buildings, providing clear access to emergency exits, employing sustainable water and energy usage, and more. By understanding and adhering to...

As a manufacturing manager, you understand the importance of having a skilled and efficient design team. If you’ve encountered our Truss Design Skills Evaluation, you know its thoroughness in assessing truss designers. This evaluation measures skills and experience across nine key areas...

In the busy world of prefabricated components, there are three conflicting metrics that owners and managers look at to determine operational performance – board feet of lumber, sales dollars, and margin dollars. I’ll start with what I believe is likely the most common but also the...

Imagine a looming deadline, a complicated 2D, multi-family floor plan. It will take days to get accurate measurements, manually. STITCHER® streamlines the process by capturing walls, openings, and intricate details with precision, transforming a 2D architectural drawing into a 3D model in a...

As the “Green” movement progresses and energy prices go increasingly higher, more and more homeowners and commercial developers are looking to utilize photovoltaic panels (solar panels) to help get them “off the grid.” It may seem that designing for solar panels is as...

My engineering journey began back in the early 2000s in the living room of our house, playing with wooden blocks and building towers as high as I could reach without letting them fall over onto little brothers (the authorities having jurisdiction [aka my parents] had a set a restriction in our...

In June 2020, my column in these pages, “Fast Walking Through the Corona Crisis,” included a discussion on my Apple watch. At the time, I was impressed to discover how it could record our physical movements, and how it used our past experience to inspire us to be more active. Even...

It never ceases to amaze me how “simple” things can become so complicated. I’m sure I’m not alone in this quandary – the feeling that you’ve stepped into a maze and now struggle to get out. Simple Beginnings, Complicated Developments Last spring, I...