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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
May 2023 #15286 Page #124
Adverti$$er
The Last Word Truss Machinery Follows the Plates
T
hroughout the 1950s, plate manufacturers kept busy improving their plate designs, while they paid scant attention to the machinery that CMs Joe Kannapell, P.E. needed to embed them. But, in the 1960s, they began focusing heavily on machinery and laid the foundation for developments that would shape truss manufacturing over the next 50 years. Three basic machine types followed: the roller, the beam press, and the C-frame. For the short-tooth plate customers, machinery wasn’t a priority, as they could get by with a wood table and roller press, which is what Ronel Corp. employed. Carol Sanford suggested little more, indicating that CMs use “a roller table where each joint is placed under 50 tons of pressure,” and he didn’t introduce his own equipment until eight years after his plate invention. During those years, he tweaked his plate design five times. Surprisingly, Sanford started with a beam-type press. Long-tooth customers had to apply considerable tonnage to embed plates. Cal Jureit set out on the beam-press methodology. By 1960, he had about 80 customers, and all of them would be pressing his second-generation plate, which used 14-gauge steel and had 13/16” long teeth. One CM has described how he used a 20-ton press to embed Gang-Nail plates, but this clearly limited the
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