The lowly wedge sometimes gets very little respect. If your plant is doing it right, the wedges usually are cut from drops or culls. That’s a good way of doing it, and it sounds very simple, but not just any piece of wood is suitable for a wedge. There are important qualifications that...

It’s true that, by nature, the materials currently used for wood trusses can vary in strength and properties. Given a specific lumber size and grade, truss builders often need to evaluate lumber picked, cut, and provided to build the specific job at hand. After verifying the lumber grade,...

Part 9 in our TIMWOODS Series Hey TimWoods, it’s time to take a pause with your Gemba walk and talk about a Waste Reduction plan using what we learned in this series. Throughout this series, our friend TimWoods has helped us focus on the wastes of Transportation, Inventory, Motion,...

In the United States, we are blessed with an abundance of quality building materials we may chose to use while fabricating our wood truss products. As long as we are able to confidently predict lumber values and our truss design software has the proper values entered, we can be assured a quality...

The knowledge we take for granted today on MSR lumber is due in large part to the pioneering work of Professor Robert Hoyle, P.E. In the early 1960s at Potlatch Forest, Inc., he conducted basic research on the relationship between stiffness and strength of lumber, paving the way for the MSR...

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...

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...

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...

The plate placement method of evaluating defects in the plated area is a good approach to use when inspecting your installed connector plates. But are you recording the results correctly? Using the plate placement method, it is common to record folded teeth or damaged teeth with a rectangle...

From worst-case scenarios to less obvious examples, do you have general guidelines that will help you make informed decisions? For example, when faced with lumber defects on the table, do you know how the builders in your plant will proceed? More importantly, are they being supplied with the...