Adding the last links to the chain of material handling – bunk-to-saw and saw-to-table – is intricately executed by Hundegger at Sunpro’s major expansion in St. George, Utah – and it’s cool! Yes, here in the northeastern-most part of the Mojave Desert, the Clyde...

The dream of having a single person model an entire structure was admirable, but developing the software to do that turned into a decade-long struggle. Five years ago, I chronicled the development saga in my series on Fifty Years of Truss Design, Parts XI – XV. As the story told, the...

The way it was – In 1986, as Dick Rotto embarked on a nationwide expansion, he admonished his salesforce, “Trussway will never have another plant as big as our Houston location.” Rotto’s warning came at a time when there wasn’t enough business in the entire state of...

The creation of wall panel software is like the creation of all software – experienced insiders do it best. That was true with Gang-Nail’s AutoPan in the 1970s, which Joe Cotton developed while building wall panels for his homebuilding business. It was also the case with Ted...

Component manufacturers have long been in search of “any practical technology that can lessen rejects”[1] when fabricating trusses from our imperfect supply of lumber. New machines and processes have increased material throughput, but they have also increased the time lost when...

By 1980, many component manufacturers were anxious to computerize their wall panel work, but they weren’t getting much help. Gang-Nail’s AutoPan was the only available solution, but it had such a steep learning curve that Gang-Nail no longer promoted it. Plus, they were singularly...

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...

The demand for wall panel equipment after World War II was unprecedented, even to this day. Industrialization was in the air, and factory-built wall panels became the gateway, even before roof trusses. Most of the action was in the affordable housing sector, driven by the mobile home, modular,...

When a ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, its fate was never in doubt. But that was not the case when a barge hit the Eads Bridge near St. Louis, MO, another steel arched truss bridge. The Key Bridge lost one of its main supports, while the Eads Bridge lost one of its truss...

Driven by the dire shortage of housing entering the 1950s, Levittown sparked a fervor for homes to be built like cars on assembly lines. Fortunately, there was a crop of returning veterans ready to oblige, whether by building whole houses or just parts of houses. William Levett delved into...