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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
October 2021 #13267 Page #132
The Last Word on Coming of Age at BCMC hat I experienced at the truss industry’s first trade show was the bare bones beginning of fifty years of industry progress. But, at first glance in 1971, it didn’t seem so, as I found only a handful of 8x10 booths, tucked in the corner of the Louisville Fairgrounds. Yet plenty of roof truss machines were sold, mostly for under $20,000, mainly to lumberyard customers. At the 1972 Show, the first engineering and cutting programs were demoed on teletype machines hooked up to remote computers via the new technology of timesharing.
Joe Kannapell, P.E.
W
At these early shows, called Industrial Building Expositions (INBEX), we were lumped in with the much larger mobile/modular/manufactured housing (MH) industry. Then we were considered to be part of the truss fabrication business. This explains why the original name of Shelter Systems was “Material Fabrication, Inc.” Unfortunately, at that time, some stick framing stalwarts used an abbreviation of that name, “pre-fab” shops, to downgrade trusses.
The 1973 INBEX hit when housing starts reached a level which hasn’t been reached since, flooding us with over a million dollars of roof truss equipment sales. Shortly thereafter, however, the oil crisis tanked housing, and INBEX folded. Four years elapsed before our industry had recovered sufficiently to support another show. This turned out to be a good time to separate from the MH industry, which never recovered, even to this day. For many of us truss suppliers, it seemed logical to join the Show attended by the buyers of most trusses, namely, the National Home Builders Show. However, the truss industry booths were nearly impossible to find in the vast halls of McCormick Place in Chicago. Clearly, we needed a better venue. Continued next page
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