Light gauge steel trusses have been around a long, long time. Steel trusses offer the same advantages that make light gauge steel framing generally appealing for a significant segment of the light frame construction industry. Light gauge steel does not burn. It does not serve as a food source for mold. It won’t warp. Termites have no use for it. As a consequence, steel trusses have found their way into a significant portion of light commercial construction…a portion that is growing.
The Cee
For many years, the dominant method for building trusses was the use of the back to back cee. Cee section stud material was available through a nationwide system of production and distribution. Stock lengths of commodity studs could be purchased through distribution. Engineering was typically done by structural engineers and involved a lot of manual work. Likewise truss production involved a lot of manual work – fetching material, cutting members on a chop saw, setting up for assembly, etc. It was an arduous process, but it got the job done. Other challenges included awkward shipping as the trusses were not “in line”. Also, roof framing and sheathing were not symmetric.
Proprietary Truss
Over time, inventive entrepreneurs developed clever proprietary material with which steel trusses could be made. The steel had more bends to give it compressive strength and generally most such trusses could be built in a single plane, unlike the back-to-back cee. Many shapes made their way to market, but few are widely used today. Automation made the difference in determining survival.
Today, only a few shapes are widely used and a major reason is the software that is used to design those trusses. The combination of effective shapes and design automation have narrowed the field to a few players. This technology has been effective. However, a large part of proprietary truss construction remains manual in nature – just as it was with back to back cees. Fetching inventory, measuring, cutting, marking of pieces, and setting up jigs are for the most part manual processes that require training, significant labor time and cost, and introduce the possibility of error.
Next Step
The technology exists to develop a system that includes design automation, material that allows for in plane truss construction, and that also automates most of the manual processes that exist today in dominant truss systems.
At Keymark, we have developed powerful steel truss software that automates the design of steel trusses out of cee – like material that can be built in plane. Production data for webs and chords is downloaded to proprietary roll formers. Pieces are not generated as stock lengths; they are cut to length, automatically marked to match up with each other, and pieces are notched and given pilot holes so they slide together and automatically jig.
The result is a system that requires little training in the shop, a process that has quality control built in, and a substantial reduction in labor cost. There is no need to buy roll formers as job specific material is generated on our roll formers and sent to fabricators for assembly.
The system is called KeyTruss and is available today from Keymark. For more information, please visit: http://www.keymarkenterprises.com/technology/keytruss/