A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
January 2021 #13258 Page #140
The Last Word... on Floor Trusses Joe Kannapell
etired now from MiTek (but not from this magazine), it is a fitting time to thank all of you I have been honored to serve. I was fortunate to have started about the time floor trusses were being introduced, and to have seen them revolutionize apartment building. In December, I observed four levels of them framing a monstrous apartment building, something I could never have imagined when I was testing them in 1971.
R
I recall assembling our very first floor trusses and installing them in our crude test rack in the back of a derelict warehouse shown here. The bottom chord splices were failing and we realized that we’d have to “pre-splice” them on their 3.5” faces. We were scrambling to catch up with our larger competitor, Truswal, who had begun promoting them in a big way, even “lending” machines to interested CMs. Within a year or two, we figured out how to trick our truss program to run them, we developed a machine to build them (the Tiger Cat), and we began designing them in earnest. Little did we know what we were in for. But I found out in a hurry. In the Summer of 1973, I was sent to investigate some issues encountered by our floor truss pioneering customer in Georgia. Initially I took notes on their Tiger Cat machine (the press head had left the track and nearly hit a worker!). Then we traveled to a two-story apartment job on Powers Ferry Road in Atlanta. The chaos there was immediately apparent – trusses butchered throughout the jobsite – several rolls of film worth. No layout in sight. Repairs that we had never contemplated. A nightmare scenario that I thought we could never engineer around. I was right. All we had done was design a product. It would take the ingenuity of component manufacturers to design systems that would ensure their integrity.
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982