Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "Stewart Hicks"
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You are wrong about most of your main points, and gang nail plates don't make ANYTHING "possible", they just make it a little cheaper and weaker.
There are countless other products and methods and techniques for building trusses, nearly all of which are stronger and last longer with fewer failures, the truss plate is just the lowest possible strength and cost way to do it, and should NOT be glorified like this.
If it had not been approved, we would still have trusses, they would just use nails or screws or bolts through the side plates, like any heavier duty and better built truss or joint would use.
Making it sound like the truss plate is this pivotal invention that makes the modern world possible means that either you are just trying to find a unique click bait hook to make a video with along the lines of an actual expert like Practical Engineering etc, or that you phoned in your research and didn't actually understand the subject very well.
The real revolution was learning how to design trusses for residential buildings in a way that didn't require teams of engineers hand calculating loads on drafting boards with slide rules, and making it possible to design trusses rapidly and cheaply so they could be used for lower cost buildings.
Getting the computer involved was really the key, so they could just plug in the design, and it would tell them the loads and what sizes of materials they needed.
The other big factor that you missed as you tried to focus everything on the truss plate is the development of truss joists and I-joists, which is what actually makes the open multi-floor plans possible, because you can span much further than with a plain wood beam with no support below.
Also, the shade given to overlapped boards and toe nails was inaccurate and unfair, because the through-nailed overlap is one of the strongest joints you can make, much stronger than the gang nail plate, and any carpenter who can use a speed square can easily make that joint.
And toe nails are actually STRONGER than the gang nail plate when done properly, because they go all the way through the wood, vs the gang nail plate just being stuck in the side, where it will come loose as the wood dries, and is especially bad in a fire where just some surface char will cause complete structural failure, even if the board itself is still unburned in the core.
So anyway, the only benefit of the gang nail plate is a minor cost reduction in the manufacture of trusses, at the cost of strength and longevity and safety, and the actual catalyst of the changes that you are talking about was the development of the ability to rapidly engineer truss design at a cost that made them an affordable option for residential construction.
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