Part Three:  Apartment Survival Strategies in the 1980s A few stalwarts “lived to tell” how they survived the Eighties, but none knew magic. What they did then works just as well today—expanded markets, refined quotes, and controlled costs. And in the collapsing...

Southern Pine grading greatly complicates the task of making lumber substitutions. The progression of the structural values of Machine Evaluated Lumber (MEL) is nothing like the progression of values of either Visually Graded or Machine Stress Rated (MSR) lumber, which both ascend like rungs on...

Part Two: The Turbulent 1980s For CMs to prosper in the 1980s, after surviving the “double-bubble” of apartment building in the 1970s, required great tenacity and innovation. Projects grew in size and complexity. Developers gained momentum and began employing scheduling and...

Buying a million pounds of U.S. steel for our company in Brazil taught me a good lesson on steel tariffs. While there were no apparent restrictions on imported steel, the Brazilian authorities used extraordinary means to prevent us from doing so, and we haven’t bought any since. I suspect...

Part One: 1960 to 1979   Garden style apartments have been good for the truss business, but have morphed into an almost unrecognizable beast. In making this transition, component manufacturers have built on 40+ years of experience, and have conquered this beast, but not without...

This isn’t the last word on housing, but only my perspective after nearly 50 years of observation. If I could have chosen any time to have started in this business, I would choose the last five years. It certainly wouldn’t have been in the turbulent 1970s (when I started) or the...

Knowing that our future depends on builders is reason enough to attend their best exhibition, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) International Builders Show (IBS). Understanding the technology that they adopt, the changes impacting them, and the shape of their new products helps us...

Disrupters have destroyed retail chains (Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com), threatened the car industry (Elon Musk at Tesla), and are now targeting the component industry (Bill Gates et. al.)? Mr. Gates and leading venture capitalists have placed separate bets totaling nearly a Billion dollars that they...

With the New Year comes new International codes, IBC and IRC 2018 (referred to as the I-Codes), and fortunately, few changes to truss designs. These changes are the result of the revised design criteria contained in ASCE 7–16, which IBC 2018 relies upon. Very few jurisdictions will...

With the holidays over and everyone going back to business as usual, I’m drawn to a topic that may help a weary traveler this year. Even if you’re stuck 20,000 feet in the air like I was, you can still get lots of good information to soothe a worried mind. For example, I could see...