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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
July 2020 #12252 Page #10
Adverti$$er
Sixty Years of Machines: Part VIII: Trackless Gantries Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
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n the 1990s, a storm began brewing in the component business. It started on the Eastern Seaboard when Carolina Builders bought a truss plant in Tidewater, Virginia. Later, it gained strength when Builders Supply & Lumber (BSL) opened a series of greenfield plants. And finally, it reached an even higher intensity when Universal Forest Products (UFP) bought Carroll Shoffner’s 14 truss plants. This storm was wrought by rapid consolidation in the building industry. And the consolidators didn’t hesitate to buy the latest machinery, thereby raising the bar for all incumbent CMs. As evidence of their earnestness, we received one of our largest machinery orders from BSL’s first plant in 1995. The buyer had no staff, experience, or history in our business, but had generous financing from Pulte Homes, and a charter to win the contractor business vacated by the closing of Lowes Contractor Yards. After touring several plants, they concluded that the roller gantry was the only way to build a truss. Likewise, UFP gained a gantry preference from their former Shoffner plants. Seeing the business potential, and the need to differentiate ourselves from the competition, we quickly set out to enhance the tracked gantry that we had purchased from Bob LePoire. Foremost on our agenda was the elimination of the rail on the floor. As with Carroll Sanford’s gantry invention, there were patent barriers that delayed our efforts. Among the patent holders was the intrepid Ronnie Wright, whose floor truss machine he aptly named “Fatman” after himself. Fortunately, our development didn’t yet concern a floor truss application, and Ronnie’s patent was near the end of its 17-year life. In 1998, we debuted our newly patented Roof Glider, which traversed on the outer steel frame of the table instead of a rail on the floor. We finally achieved the long sought after “plates-won’t-fallRonnie Wright Fatman Floor Machine off” advantage. The frame was a strong weldment, borrowed from LePoire’s design, that could glide across walkways and maintain consistent plate embedment. Early on, this machine established us as a leader in roof equipment and provided us a platform for continuous improvement.
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