After this year’s BCMC, it’s worth considering how far our industry has progressed since we first went to a trade show. The year was 1958, and the National Association of Home Builders Show (NAHB now IBS) was the only way to reach a national audience. Fortunately, we had one...

Civil engineer Cal Jureit had moved on from wood structures to concrete foundations, but not completely. While he was engaged with the problem of building houses on Miami’s marshes near the Everglades, he had left the problem of wood connections unresolved. Perhaps his ongoing work on Dade...

Attendees at BCMC 2019 stood safely right next to an awesome gesticulating robot and became immersed in observing record-breaking truss building – virtually, that is, through a VR headset. Back then, Trussmatic robots hadn’t made it stateside, and hadn’t yet handled our crazy...

A nearly perfect confluence of circumstances combined to create the truss plate in South Florida. The wartime home-building hiatus, the post-war baby boom, and the northward (from Cuba) and southward (snowbird) migration to Florida all combined to skyrocket the demand for new housing. But what...

When $20 Billion behemoth Builders First Source (BFS) launched a robotic truss line in April, CMs were surprised that they would select House of Design (HoD)’s first truss machine, and the industry’s first robotic floor truss line. Remarkably, after just over 3 months, they’ve...

For most of history, wood structures had been constrained by their connections. Nailed or bolted joints could only carry about half of what the wood could. As a result, our most abundant natural resource went mainly into homebuilding, where spans were short and stresses were low. That began to...

Robotics showed new promise for many CMs on May 17, ironically, by borrowing from the past 60 years of truss machinery. Attendees at SBCA’s Open Quarterly Meeting in Williamsburg, VA saw video of robots feeding truss parts into auto-jigging at the plant of their largest competitor,...

In the year 2000, a transformation, like none other, gripped our industry. Jim Urmson’s TCT started it by breaking our component-saw-centric paradigm. Then in 2002, Dave McAdoo’s ALS quickened its pace by adding the capability to cut every conceivable truss part. But even before his...

From the quirky advance of truss machinery described in my Sixty Years of Machines series, one might conclude that we’re a quirky industry. We may be, but innovation in truss manufacturing is no different than advancement in U.S. industry in general. And, in fact, we are the epitome of...

Downstream and upstream, the linear saw continues to improve the flow of truss manufacturing. Increasingly, cutting and assembly are treated as interdependent processes and have begun to be tied together. Jim Urmson started this, others have followed, and a “cut truss-by-truss”...