Ed Ryan said it in the 1960s, Dick Rotto in the 1980s, and Pulte in the1990s and 2020s, but it took a PhD, Ricardo Brites, Director of Engineering of Mercer Mass Timber, to layout some good evidence that a successful manufacturing plant needs to operate at a level of at least 75% of capacity. In...

Wall panels gradually insinuated themselves into the minds of homebuilders throughout the 1930s, helped greatly by government actions. As these builders were unable to sell their custom models during the Great Depression, a few of them experimented with lower-cost construction methods. The...

For most of the 20th century, engineers did not study nor would they normally specify wood trusses. Wood was thought to be suitable only for houses and barns, so steel was the material of choice – except when there wasn’t enough steel. That was the situation the Army Corps of...

Have you asked a framer lately what floor system they prefer? I did, after seeing a crew I’ve watched use I-joists for the last couple of years now switch to floor trusses. But I wondered why they did so only on town houses. Here’s what I observed: December 12, 2023 –...