Until recently, vertical members have been the bane of all jigging systems, whether they occur on the perimeter or the interior of trusses. And they are found more than ever on apartment and residential designs. Handling these members without human intervention has been the Achilles heel of...

To complete this floor series, it’s worth examining how we’re doing against I-joists. [For all graphs and images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.] Mixed Signals: Many CMs think trusses are slowly making gains, and this is backed up by the brisk sales of floor machines. However,...

Before leaving the subject of floor trusses, two machines deserve special attention, the Tiger Cat and the Structur-Span. Both included features that were way ahead of their 1970s provenance and both were markedly faster than even present-day machines. Both plated the truss with a single pass,...

Builders have been testing the viability of floor trusses, and they are now considering the results. Many of them switched from I-joists only because they were forced to do so. Either they couldn’t get them, or they didn’t want to pay double the price. Yet today, as they are seeing...

A special opportunity to help special people exists near most truss plants, as was discovered independently by both Richard Pedde and me. This “find” has turned out to be such a blessing to Richard that he constantly chides himself for passing by this resource twice a day for seven...

Building intricate floor truss details may bedevil a robot, but they provide the inherent advantage of floor trusses over I-joists. There are also things that floor trusses can do that I-joists cannot. And they facilitate the most efficient use of materials. Visiting an I-joist cut-off yard...

New inventions may fade away, but most provide valuable lessons, like the concrete truss machine. Not many of these were built, but they seemed to Cal Jureit to be the logical match for his new truss plate, and they set the course for all his future machines. Jureit had to have been...

Our contemporary floor machines were ready for the resurgence of demand that has followed the pandemic. These new models had many fascinating features, accumulated from the multiple iterations before them. They were more durable, they lessened labor, and they built a quality truss, embedding all...

Wars seem to surround us today, but this has been the case since the founding of our country and our industry. While we are troubled by today’s calamities, we should stop and reflect on those who have fought these wars, especially on this coming Veterans Day, November 11.   Take...

Component manufacturers learned one very painful floor truss lesson in the 1970s that needed to be remedied in the 1980s – nightmare repairs can result from plates not being fully embedded. That predicament usually resulted from insufficient tonnage to fully press the larger plates found...