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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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August 2020 #12253 Page #10
Sixty Years of Machines: Part IX: Automatic Setup Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
“I think this will work”
S
aid Dick Rotto at the unveiling of auto-jigging at the 1988 BCMC in Nashville. This was a high compliment from the founder of the most prolific truss business, Trussway, Inc. And Dick had no equipment compatible with auto-jigging in his highly productive plants. But the system he perfected in Houston powered Trussway through Texas’s severe downturn. Though auto-jigging would be in Trussway’s future, Rotto and many other incumbents demurred. However, Alpine’s largest customer deployed such a system. But the new blood in our industry had no hesitation to try to get a leg up on the Dick Rottos of the truss world. And so rather hurriedly, a Koskovich Jet Set showed up at the home base of Builders FirstSource. Its appeal was its apparent simplicity. The mechanism seemed well protected in its own enclosure. And like all auto-jigging, it relied on only 3 simple mechanical components: a motor, belt, and screw. An electrical component, called an encoder, directed the motor how many revolutions to turn. In the example shown here, the puck is moved 10 inches by turning the screw 100 revolutions. If the mechanism delivers 1000 rpm (revolutions per minute) to the screw, the time to turn it 100 revolutions would be 1/10 minutes or 6 seconds. Likewise, to move 100 inches, or over 8 feet, would take one minute. The labor savings of auto-jigging becomes immediately apparent. If without automation a build crew spent half their time setting up and half building trusses, they’d recover nearly half a day’s work. In other words, they could build twice as many trusses with the same staff, on the same equipment, without additional plant space. Who wouldn’t jump on that opportunity? In the long run, nearly every truss plant with enough volume can justify such a system. The questions became, in the early 1990s, how much does it cost, and how long is the pay off? A rough price of $250,000 was suggested at BCMC, but no systems had yet been installed.
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