You’re looking at Canada’s first robotic roof truss manufacturing line, and it is located in Huron County, Ont. “The robotics go slower than human beings, but they’re consistent,” said the Founder and President of Atlas Engineered Products, Hadi Abassi. Abassi bought Clinton Truss in 2018, with the idea of revolutionizing how roof trusses were built in Canada. Two years ago, he started construction of this $20 million facility in Vanastra, Ont., to robotically manufacture roof trusses, streamlining the production process from start to finish. “And not just trusses. We have the same system, and same vision for the component construction, for the walls section and floor sections,” said Abassi. With 10 factories across Canada, Abassi aims to build homes piece by piece, and deliver them to construction sites across North America, speeding up the on-site home construction process. “We will take a set of plans. We will break it out. We build it like a jigsaw puzzle. Very simple puzzle. So instead of taking three or four months to build from the foundation up, we can do this with the installation crew in four to five days,” said Abassi. For the previous founder and former owner of Clinton Truss, Harvey Poirier, seeing his former company on the cutting edge of truss construction is nothing short of astounding. “We heard them talking about this about two years ago or something like it. It looks pretty good so far,” said Poirier. Huron East Mayor Bernie MacLellan says he’s happy to see a company started 28 years ago moving into the future and doing so in Huron County. “People didn’t understand that it was in Vanastra, but they had a great reputation to begin with. And now they’re just taking it to the next level and doing automation that nobody else in Canada has ever done before,” said MacLellan. Abassi says they’ll have a mix of manual and robotic truss manufacturing for the time being, with an expansion of jobs from the current 40 employees in the near future. “We’re hoping that we can double that very soon. Right now, we have asked for 20 more people for this facility. You cannot do it without human beings, but it’s a great compliment to the human being. You still need the race car drivers, but you have an amazing car to drive now,” said Abassi. Helping to enable the expansion in Vanastra, a $4 million grant from Natural Resources Canada’s Forestry Innovation Support Program.
