Cutting Pieces for Floor Trusses

Floor trusses are made from, primarily, three kinds of he pieces. Chords form the top and bottom of the truss, verticals and diagonals  the "insides," or webs. Cutting the chords and verticals for floor trusses is very straightforward, all that's needed is a saw that can cut 90 degree angles. A component saw is the ideal choice because of it's ability to cut a large number of pieces quickly, but a simple radial arm saw can keep a single floor truss fabrication line supplied with chords and verticals by itself.

More challenging are the diagonal webs, which can very from as long a 36" to less than a foot, Sometimes only only a few are needed and on other jobs hundreds or even the thousands identical pieces are needed. A dedicated floor truss web cutter, like the Monet FWA 500 (shown here,) is the most common solution for cutting webs.

Floor truss web saws have four blades and are designed to quickly cut small, mostly four angle pieces. The saws are set up manually, a fairly slow process, because most of the time they are used to cut hundreds of identical pieces for each setup.

Lineal saws can cut floor truss pieces, but lineal saws are not ideally suited to these long runs of the single piece. Component saws take extra time, both to set up for the (many times) very short pieces, and change the carrige height in order to cut pieces laying "on their side" rather than "on edge."

Radial arm saws can cut floor truss webs "in a pinch," but are even more poorly suited for this work than lineal saws. The sawyer must hold the piece on it's 1 1/2" edge and cut up to four angles, sometimes at "close quarters."