After an impressive debut and ten sales on the BCMC Show floor, the fate of the Alpine Linear Saw (ALS) was still up in the air. Few knew that the ALS was the product of a 105-day crash effort (see “One Hundred Five Days in 2002,” by Dave McAdoo in the December 2021 issue), and that the saw wasn’t “finished” until 3 am on the day it had to ship to the Show. This was a gutsy gamble – sending such a highly sophisticated machine to market without field testing. The Auto-Omni, for example, wasn’t exhibited until it ran successfully in daily production at Villaume Industries. Even still, Alpine did test the ALS stealthily during the three days of the Show.
When Dave McAdoo himself, Alpine’s Director of Engineering, was feeding boards through the saw at BCMC, it didn’t seem to raise suspicions. But what he was doing was remarkable, conducting Alpha testing when his handiwork was almost usable. That enabled him to discover software and hardware glitches in the course of demos. Though they occurred while customers were carefully scrutinizing the ALS’s operation, its remarkable capabilities masked their impact. However, McAdoo was able to recognize their significance, preplan corrective measures, and to avoid pitfalls on the demos that followed.
The ALS made good on its “cut everything” claim at the Show but was also a lot more complex than the “simple” TCT across the Show floor. And there were a dozen TCT users that would back up its reliability, underscoring how crucial Alpine’s Beta tests would be. But even before they were conducted, the 2002 BCMC put the linear saw on a fast track and established the complementary roles of the TCT and ALS. As evidence, Dave McAdoo invited Jim Urmson and his wife Shirley to Alpine’s booth, “and we had a nice discussion about the future of the linear concept. No animosity. No one upmanship. Just a professional discussion about the challenges and possibilities of the concept.”
After the Show, and with the ALS being reworked in McAdoo’s shop in Texas, Randy Yost was roving around Florida seeking the right testing grounds. Surprisingly, he didn’t approach one of several hot ALS prospects that he identified at BCMC. Instead, Yost reasoned smartly that they might demand too much of the saw. Instead, he went to a highly regarded plant, Production Truss and Fabrication, that didn’t need to rely too heavily on it, and would be a willing and patient development partner.
In retrospect, McAdoo acknowledged “that the ALS was far from ready for prime time at the show…we took the saw back to our shop and worked on it for weeks before sending it to the beta site.” Unfortunately, that beta site was 1300 miles distant in Florida, but it did prove to be ideal otherwise. Production Truss was right in the middle of TCT’s Florida stronghold and close to Custom Design Truss, one of TCT’s best exemplars. Howard Brennan, Custom’s owner, was the first to run two TCTs, and specialized in the most cut-up trusses, typically bound for complex South Florida residences.
Contrarily, Tom Mabry ran Production Truss on high volume apartment work. He and his production head, Bill Carter, had put together one of the first fully automated plants at their new location in Boca Raton. The ALS would have to hold its own and complement Production’s well-oiled machine consisting of three AutoMills feeding three AutoSet C3 lines. Bill Carter put it to the test, in the words of Dave McAdoo, “We spent months at the beta site ironing out bugs in the automation system as well as the computer programs that controlled it. Plus, we modified the mechanics of it numerous times. The ominous deadline of the show was no longer present, but the demands of the field were none-the-less challenging, and the beta site customer became pretty impatient at times.”
McAdoo and his team persevered through these trials and took Alpine’s Linear Saw over this final hurdle with flying colors. They proved the efficacy of the linear saw in any truss plant, small or large, and they did it in one astounding year after its launch. Back in mid-2002 when they started, as McAdoo reflected, “The linear concept was in its infancy. Would it blossom into a ‘thing,’ or would it end up on the scrap heap of ideas that never quite worked out? History has answered that question in spades, but prior to BCMC there was a great deal of uncertainty. That ambivalence began to fade at the show and our headstrong claim that the ALS could ‘cut anything for trusses’ put it to bed over the next year or two. I personally and publicly challenged the industry to bring us a truss part that they couldn’t cut, and a few took me up on it. The ALS could handle most of them outright, and only required some software programming to handle the rest.”
The TCT and the ALS sparked an unmatched period of saw innovation that continued throughout the early years of the New Millennium. Jim Urmson, Dave McAdoo, and their competitors would soon take the linear saw to new levels of productivity and begin its integration into the truss assembly process.
Next Month:
Linear Saws: Out of the box