Ten years after the Sanford Gantry stormed onto the scene, the DePauw Saw arrived without much fanfare. Their introductions said a lot about their inventors. Carroll Sanford was an ebullient architect, Art DePauw an unassuming machinist. If both men were alive today, they would relish seeing variants of their inventions in nearly all truss plants. Though both of their machines evolved steadily, Art DePauw’s design has been the most enduring. The DePauw legacy is arguably the richest in all our sixty years of machines, spawning $400,000,000 in sales by MiTek and Monet DeSauw. And from amazingly humble beginnings.
In the mid-1970s, Art went to the homebuilder’s show at McCormick Place in Chicago with drawings of a component cutter that he had conceived, partly based on the needs of a nearby truss plant, Imperial Components. The owner of that plant, Dave Chambers, had previously ordered one “sight unseen” based on Art’s promises. At this Show, and based on his sale to Chambers, Art desperately needed to convince other CMs to buy his saw, to gain startup cash from their deposits. Among several he convinced was Charlie Barnes, inventor of the Barnes Trailer and cofounder of Trussway.
Art’s main selling point was the decreased setup time resulting from powered angulation. At this juncture, sawyers had to read scales on quadrants and hand-crank saw motors to desired angles. Art found that French DC motors would enable adequate control of angulation (today’s VFD’s – Variable Frequency Drives – were too bulky and expensive back then). However, by the time of the Show, Art had never built a complete saw, and he would be in real trouble if he failed to please Chambers and Barnes, two industry titans.
In the months after the Show, near the peak of the housing boom, orders picked up at Art’s small machine shop in St. Charles, IL, and so did the pressure. However, his shop could only accommodate one fully assembled saw at a time. When customers called, he began telling them, “I’m looking at your saw and it’s on the shop floor.” It was on the floor but only as a collection of parts! After several such calls, a persistent Charlie Barnes had to go see for himself. But before he left Dallas, he phoned Dave Chambers and told him he would like to drop by “while he was in the area.” Dave quickly figured out that Charlie was really coming to check on his saw or why else would he travel to a distant Chicago suburb? Dave quickly instructed his plant manager, Don Hershey, to get on a forklift and “steal” his saw from Art’s shop, no matter its state of repair. Don was an imposing figure, and Art was not about to deny him. Thus began the discontent of multiple CMs, that foretold the inevitable. But somehow Art was able to navigate the chaos and produce a couple dozen saws afterwards, many to leading CMs. In the process, he refined the saw’s mechanisms, some of which we still use today. By the time we bought his company, he had a solid product, great customers, but was totally overwhelmed.
The day we announced our purchase of the DePauw Company, we were already 45 saws behind. We quickly dispatched several of our plant people, including our current associates, Pat Linton and Greg Finn, who worked there 70 hours a week through a freezing Chicago winter. We never could catch up in Art’s shop, but here we got lucky. Our cavernous new machinery plant in the St. Louis suburbs was nearly empty. Many in our company had wondered why our owner, Walter Moehlenpah, had built such a large structure when most of our machines would fit in the back of a pickup truck. But without his insistence on a 50’ column spacing, we wouldn’t have been able to set up an assembly line for 32’ wide DePauw saw frames.
Art moved to St. Louis and stayed with us for a time, but ultimately left and made a career traveling the country, servicing his saws from a mobile van until late in life. Though we had purchased his company and his trade name, he had previously sold the rights to his saw in Europe, which entity later became Monet-Desauw in the U.S. The basic mechanics of the DePauw saw remains intact today but, over the next four decades, has had to surmount multiple challenges. The need for faster sawing in the 1980s was urgent.
P.S.:
Charlie Barnes received his saw, and his legacy continues at Trussway (see “The Last Word” at the end of this issue).
Next Month:
Hex Heads
Since 1970, Joe Kannapell has worked as programmer, Chief Engineer, Marketing Manager, and Sales VP for MiTek, plus 7 years at truss plants, retiring at the end of 2020.