The Story Behind JAX, The Wood Retriever Richard Pedde When I acquired the former Ryland Homes component plant, I bought automated saws but couldn’t find an automated way to feed all three of them. Like most component manufacturers, I needed to pick small numbers of boards for my linear saws’ orders and large numbers of boards for my... Read More November 2024 Issue #16304 Page 82
The Last Word: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Big Truss Plants Joe Kannapell 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... Read More August 2024 Issue #16301 Page 154
Floor Truss Technology, Part VII: The Devil is in Those Details Joe Kannapell 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... Read More December 2023 Issue #15293 Page 10
The Last Word: The Concrete Truss Machine Joe Kannapell 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... Read More December 2023 Issue #15293 Page 134
Floor Truss Technology, Part VI: The Last Round of Floor Machines Joe Kannapell 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... Read More November 2023 Issue #15292 Page 10
Floor Truss Technology, Part V: Current Machines Joe Kannapell 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... Read More October 2023 Issue #15291 Page 10
Floor Truss Technology, Part IV: Second Generation Machinery Joe Kannapell Seeing floor trusses for the first time, Dick Rotto immediately pursued an order, even before he had a floor machine or the know-how to build floor trusses. He and his young crew at Trussway had many questions though, as did every CM taking on this intriguing new product. What kind of table... Read More September 2023 Issue #15290 Page 10
The Last Word: Truss Machinery Follows the Plates Joe Kannapell Throughout the 1950s, plate manufacturers kept busy improving their plate designs, while they paid scant attention to the machinery that CMs needed to embed them. But, in the 1960s, they began focusing heavily on machinery and laid the foundation for developments that would shape truss... Read More May 2023 Issue #15286 Page 124
The Spida Showcase of Products at BCMC Wendy Boyd Spida has put together the most wonderful range of machinery to see at BCMC 2022 — we’ll have an extensive showcase of products to ensure your production is streamlined and ready to face your bottle-necks head on! If you’re ready to become less dependent on your fluctuating... Read More September 2022 Issue #14278 Page 19
The Last Word: The Last Word on the Robotics Transition Joe Kannapell 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,... Read More July 2022 Issue #14276 Page 132