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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
November 2018 #10232 Page #8
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Part IV: In-House Computers
Joe Kannapell - Senior VP MiTek Industries, Inc. www.mii.com
T
en years after we installed our first computer, our turnaround of truss designs remained unacceptable. But one evening in the late Seventies, I saw daylight when a red, white, and blue van pulled up to our St. Louis office. I recall my wonderment back then, while handing the FedEx Man the overnight pouch at 7pm, that our customer would receive his drawings 15 hours later. For once we had achieved 24-hour turnaround! Rarely, though, could we replicate that effort: receiving a truss request via facsimile machine, completing a truss input form, keying it into a computer terminal, pasting up the output, and me sealing it. Contrast that fire drill 40 years ago with the near-automatic process that dispatches a million sealed drawings a month to CMs in 2018! The key element of our improved turnaround was the file-cabinet sized box we installed at a CM’s plant; the mini-computer shown here. Our customers, like Heart Truss in Michigan (still owned today by the Butcher family) had no less of a drill: drawing a sketch of the trusses, getting the trusses to run successfully on their computer, sending their sketch and printed output to us via fax machine, and waiting for sealed drawings to be returned. Since Heart’s computer contained the same truss design program as ours in St. Louis, we were assured that we could reproduce the identical truss output, but we were required to rerun it. We supplied hundreds of these Qwip fax
For the first time, machines truss designers at Heart and select truss plants across the country began reaping the rewards of interactive design. Most importantly they derived nearly instantaneous results. If a truss “crashed,” they could alter the input and rerun it immediately; for instance, raising the top chord pitch of a scissor truss incrementally until it worked. While this iterative process consumed valuable computer time, its optimized outputs were unbeatable.
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