The Maronda Insider: Part 3, Wall & Floor Fabrication
Closed Captioning: We’re here in our wall and floor fabrication area. Over here is our floor Truss construction area, or tables. We optimize and utilize the scrap from our roof line to come in and give us the components for our interior webs. We put the top and bottom cords and webs, which we construct on the floor trusses. The floor trusses are a component of our cassette system that is sitting on there, we have people moving the floor system right there, as the truss system after it’s completed. We take the scrap off of the roof line and we re-cut it into the appropriate webs needed for the floor system. We construct our panels on our pin tables, as soon as they’re done on our pin tables, through computer operation, they come to the center roller line. It’s on a roller line, delivers it to the end of the line where they’re picked up with a crane and they are put in their panel orientation to be erected onto your home.
We do more with less, we use technology to put us at the forefront of the building industry. As part of our floor line we have a central gantry. The center gantry works both sides of the table. The center gantry takes through air suction, picks up your floor decking, and places the floor decking directly on the cassette system after it’s been put together through the jig pen tables. The jig pin tables allow for exact calculations to the blueprints. You cannot install anything different than where they’re placed. So, if you see one jig set up now, we have our people erecting those floor trusses. They’re going to place them up there and they’ll be placed in the correct orientation with the upright jig, then they’ll be moved to the other to be placed in this proper orientation, depending on the computer program.
We’ve come over to our wall panel side of the plant. Right there in our hopper is all our window and door openings that would be placed in their exterior walls as necessary. So we build the components prior to them going in there and dropping into the wall panel. As we’re coming through we got multiple different component areas to be constructed and pre-cut based on the computer design. Walking down the line, it’s where we get into the fabrication of the wall system itself. fabrication again is computer driven, there is no guesswork, it is a hundred percent, per the program.
This is the start of the station, station five, where the two by fours are installed in the exterior walls. We’re building exterior walls now, we also build interior walls. The exterior walls follow the computer programming, it brings the stud up, places it, and nails it off. You notice at this point the operator is installing the double two by four. That double two by four indicates an area where a piece of plywood will go. At every corner, we install a double two by four and we have three inches of solid member which creates a moment frame every four feet, which makes it a much stiffer diaphragm. At our next station, we have our robots installing the sheathing. Currently it is grabbing the sheathing and placing it onto the conveyor. The conveyor moves it over, the other robot suction cups and grabs it and places it on the board, then that board is readjusted to make sure it’s square and then it’ll be stapled. This technology allows us to 1: Build everything precisely, and 2: Give you the easy observable better value that Maronda has been known for.
We’re at station eleven where we fasten the sheathing to the wall panel itself. So, we use automated machines to go ahead and fasten it so this way we know we’re installing everything correctly. So these are one and three quarter inch by one inch staples, they get fastened every two inches on center. So in this area, we’re cutting our window openings. It’s consistency and it’s computer driven design that makes it exact which results in savings to the homeowner. So right now we got our window cut out exactly. Down at these other stations is where we’re doing our quality control check. Any staples that were missed, or any nailing that needs to be done, we complete it at the very end, along with installing the tape in areas that we can. We’re also truing up the openings just in place, we have a little bit of overage to make sure that the job is correct when it gets out there. This is part of Maronda in-house quality control.
So we have a wall panel moving into our final station which is our final trimming and stacking station. This has two saws that will adjust to the appropriate heights. Our walls are length to the wall, so if it comes in, it’ll cut it to the appropriate length. It’ll then locate it, pick it up, and stack it in its appropriate location on our cube to be efficiently shipped out on site. So at this point, our upward crane is going to grab it and it’s going to place it onto our stack.