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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
May 2022 #14274 Page #10
Sixty Years of Machines Part XXX: Linear Saws Go with the Flow Joe Kannapell
ownstream and upstream, the linear saw continues to improve the flow of truss manufacturing. Increasingly, cutting and assembly are treated as interdependent processes and have begun to be tied together. Jim Urmson started this, others have followed, and a “cut truss-bytruss” paradigm has emerged. In the process, the (circa 1942) Lineberry Carts have become an anachronism.
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In 2005, Jim Urmson added an integrated two-stage bunk-to-table system to his groundbreaking TCT. The first stage, feeding the saw, employed a better, V-wheeled Lineberry, designed for rapid reloading of bunks of lumber. And their compact arrangement foreshadowed Steve Aylsworth’s Ranger RS System (see “Witnessing Integration at BCMC”). By arranging the units of lumber side-by-side, boards can be pulled from the end of the bunk rather than from the side. Not only does this save the picker’s back, but it also saves him multiple steps moving from bunk-to-bunk. And because of the TCT’s optimization, selecting from longer, more costly lengths can be just as efficient as pulling from lower-priced shorts. Savings also accrue from stocking fewer SKUs and handling less material. These factors combine to lower material and labor costs, and to facilitate the processing of smaller, table-ready batches, without concern for the number of carts that would have otherwise been required. Urmson’s second stage, sending cut parts down a conveyor instead of onto carts, was pioneered by early TCT adopters, Steve Rothenbach of Forest Products and Mike White of Manning Building Supply. Today, Tim Bennett, Manning’s GM, further leverages the capacity of the conveyor by cutting mainly truss-by-truss. His sawyer stacks webs-on-top-of-chords at the TCT outfeed, bands the cut parts together, and conveys the bundle to one of two build stations. Organizing cut parts this way lessens jig setup and assembly time (see comparison at https://youtu.be/YrSCdxsffa4). The only time Bennett doesn’t cut one truss at a time is for longer runs, which he divides into batches of 10, matching the capacity of the conveyor. Continued next page
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