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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
December 2022 #14281 Page #10
The Development of the Truss Plate, Part V: Frenetic First Get-Together welve competitors faced one another for the first time—but only because they had to. Each of their fledgling plate businesses was threatened by a July 31 deadline from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and By Joe Kannapell they had less than three weeks to put together a design criterion for plated trusses. Half of them came from across the country to reach Miami, Florida for this meeting, while the other half came from nearby. But they represented what was said to include about 50 entities building plated trusses. All except one of the attendees had been active in the business for more than three years, and all were independent small businessmen. No matter how they got there, they must have seen the potential of this new product—but they had their work cut out for them on this hot summer day. The instigators of this July 5, 1960 meeting were the four earliest South Florida truss plate manufacturers: H-Brace, Sanford, Gang-Nail, and Ronel.
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Each of these pioneering companies had patented a unique truss connector and gained success marketing it for several years. The first was Charles McAdam, whose wrap-around connector was brought by Carol Sanford to Cal Jureit’s lab for testing, although it did not gain much traction. While Sanford left to develop the Gri-P-Plate, McAdam introduced a nail-on plate that could be affixed from one side, eliminating flipping of the truss. This required the use of a specially notched nail that bent when driven into a soft sheet metal back plate, creating a clinching effect, which dramatically increased the strength of the connection. The H-Brace was widely used, as attested by Karl The Losen, current owner of Ridgway Roof Truss in Gainesville, FL, and Vivian Hollinshed, the late owner of Comtech, Inc. in Fayetteville, NC.
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