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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
January 2019 #11234 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Part VI: Desktop Engineering Rocks the Design World
Joe Kannapell - Senior VP MiTek Industries, Inc. www.mii.com
O
ne man, an accomplished CM, set out to ramp-up the efficiency of truss designers in the Eighties: Mr. Leonard Sylk. He did it by pioneering the in-house computer, and its user-friendly software. By use of this tool, he envisioned a plant requiring less skilled technicians, cranking out truss designs by the minute. He also aimed to reduce a designer’s workload via a computer filing system. And he demonstrated the success of both systems in his large component plant outside Philadelphia. Mr. Sylk, like Mr. Trump, is an unconventional figure. Both are Ivy Leaguers, products of the Wharton School of Business. Both are rough and tumble, second generation entrepreneurs. Mr. Sylk distinguished himself, however, in a brand new venue: our component industry. He was among the first, in the early 1970s, to dramatically improve production processes and costing at his Material Fabrication, Inc. facility. By the late 1970s, having addressed shop labor, he turned his attention to office labor, namely by improving designer productivity. Innovation, like that marketed by Mr. Sylk, was especially appealing to CMs in the turbulent 1970s. Mid decade, housing starts had dropped more than half from their all-time record level in 1972, but by 1978 were again rising toward that record. Vietnam was behind us, and Americans craved the more affordable housing that our industry facilitated. But using the cumbersome manual systems of that day, like pouring through reams of standard engineering designs, designers couldn’t keep up with increasingly complex truss requests. Enter Mr. Sylk’s Hewlett Packard 9845 Computer, a self-contained, all-in-one workhorse.
Three innovations made the HP 9845 ideal for truss design: computer prompting, graphical display, and integral printing. The first made input much simpler: replacing the exacting data entry formerly required (see our old input form pictured). Designers, for example, had to recall and enter the correct (cryptic) identifiers for top chord materials, ‘343’ for #2 2x4 Southern Pine lumber, ‘345’ for #1 2x4 SYP, etc. Obviously this method was error-prone and required a skilled technician. Contrast this to answering simple prompts on the 9845 like “span=?” Continued next page
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