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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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October 2021 #13267 Page #10
Sixty Years of Machines Part XXIII: Linear Saw Wave Joe Kannapell
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s the new Millennium dawned, it still hadn’t dawned on CMs that a linear saw was a sure bet. Jim Urmson was getting great results with his rough prototype, but he didn’t know whether other truss shops would. Fortunately, Jim’s plate salesman, Sid Gwyn, was so confident in Jim’s saw that Sid paid him upfront to build a production model. (Today, at age 82, Sid recalls how he had admired the simplicity of Jim’s “single head” saw, compared with the complexity of the “four head” saw that he himself had tried to build). Jim now had the capital he needed to turn his invention into a marketable product that might, in his words, “create a good side business.” Over the following months, Jim went to work refining his machine while Sid went to work selling the saw using a video of the prototype, but he failed to gain much interest. But since Sid would soon own the saw and didn’t own a truss plant, he had to make a deal with someone. He finally found a home for the saw at Suwanee Truss (now BFS) in Lake City, Florida, but had to sell it for what he paid for it, in order to get the plate business. In late 1999, Jim shipped a totally transformed saw, christened the “TCT,” two hours north to Lake City. He had replaced the surrounding cage with a clean white metal box, with a top-to-bottom front access door. Everything about the enclosure echoed the simplicity and safety of the machine inside. The saw and its computer interface were built on a pedestal, enabling it to be a relatively simple “plug and play” type of installation. In December 1999, Sid Gwyn circulated a new video of the Lake City TCT, and Jim began building TCT #3. Despite the vastly improved look of the saw, Sid found no takers and Jim had to sell it himself. Because he believed in his product, he left no stone unturned among Florida CMs. First, he visited them and showed the Lake City video on a portable TV/VCR unit. Next, he invited them to Lake City or his own plant to see its productivity firsthand. And finally, he towed the TCT to their locations, and showed them what it could do in their environment by cutting parts for their current truss orders. Continued next page
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