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Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
May 2020 #12250 Page #10
Sixty Years of Machines: Part VI: Roller Gantries Enhanced Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
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s housing boomed in the mid-1980s, truss plants needed better equipment. Among those was Heart Truss and Engineering in Michigan. Heart was also benefitting from booming auto plants nearby. Their production head, Bob LePoire, pondered how to keep up. Bob’s boss and Heart’s co-founder, Don Butcher (father of current owner Joe Butcher), had assembled an array of single-purpose roof truss equipment in his plant, “specifically suited to the task at hand,” as Don had explained to me a decade earlier. But Bob sought a more general solution, a machine that could build any truss efficiently. In 1982, Bob began experimenting with a roller, determined to improve upon its shortcomings, especially the quality of its plate embedment. This “boutique” method of innovation – ideas conceived in component plants and executed in local machine shops – was the norm through much of the first turbulent 30 years of our history. That we machinery suppliers didn’t innovate is best explained by the severity of the cycles shown in the chart. Twice in the 1970s, we contracted to build a new plant during a runup in housing, and twice we moved in during the middle of a down cycle. Another reason for our reticence to build a gantry was our substantial investment in hydraulic presses. Most of our customers were users of our equipment and, like Heart Truss, didn’t come to us asking for roller gantries. In addition, the Sanford gantry was a straightforward mechanism, and, once it lost patent protection, was easily replicated. Even a self-proclaimed “dumb welder” like the late Ronnie Wright could build them, one at a time, successfully.
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