1998-Rural Builder, 'New R-Value Bosts SIPs', Febuary Issue

1999-Tools of the Trade, Building with SIPs, January Issue (copy below)

2001- Rural Builder Magazine, 'Committed SIPs Builder Is Gung Ho' September Issue

2001-Country Home Magazine

2001-Building Systems Magazine 'Show Homes Go On at Grand Central Despite Attacks' November Issue

2004-Metropolis Magazine

2004- This Old House Magazine-Online

Project Diary about our panelized floor systems- August Issue

2004- This Old House Magazine-Online

Project Diary about our Insulspan walls and roof system-September Issue

2004- This Old House Magazine - 'Building Blocks', Nov. Issue

2004- Eco-Structure - 'Highland Center', May/June Issue

2005- Journal of Light Construction- ‘Fast Floors with SIPs’,

2005- Timber Frame Homes-

TELEVISION APPEARANCES

• 1989- This Old House, Concord, MA
• 1997- This Old House, Milton, MA
• 1998- Bob Vila's Home Again, Marstons Mills, MA (view here)
• 1998- Your New House with Michael Holigan (transcript below)
• 2004- This Old House, Carlisle, MA - 3 Episodes
• 2005- DIY’s “Assembly Required”- Wells River, VT
•  

AWARDS

2001- Gold Award- Energy Efficient Housing Award- Sam Awards presented by HBRANH

2001-Silver Award- Single Family Detached Award-

Sam Awards presented by HBRANH

2004-Excellence in Building presented by SIPA

2004-Excellence in Building presented by SIPA

2004-Excellence in Building presented by SIPA

Including many projects receiving awards for the quality of construction not directly awarded to Panel Pros.

Panel Pros crew with Bob Vila from "Home Again." Jim LeRoy, President of Panel Pros, is standing to the right of Bob Vila (center). Frank Baker, CEO of Insulspan, Inc., is at the far right.

TRANSCRIPT TO MICHAEL HOLIGAN SHOW

Your New House
March 14 & 15, 1998
Episode #74

Transcript

Michael Holigan: Today we're going to show you an alternative method for building your new house that is gaining some noticeable popularity. Structural insulated panels, called SIPS for short, are pre-measured, pre-cut panels created in a climate controlled factory. They arrive ready to be assembled at more than 8,000 new home sites every year. Like a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle the panels fit together snugly to form the exterior shell of the house.

This SIPS building system offer several advantages for your builder, but it also creates a lot of added value and comfort for home owners. One of the big benefits of a structural insulated panel house is the walls themselves are solid sheets of oriented strand board both on the inside and the outside of the home with foam in between. It's actually adhesively welded to the foam itself. Think that means glued. But anyway, it makes for a really strong wall, whether it's the wind hitting it or a heavy snow load.

Now you may be wondering when you see all this foam, you know, how are we going to get our electrical wires through there and our plumbing? Well if you see these red lines painted on the panels themselves, those are actually chases, or holes, running all the way through the panel that we can just stick our wires through. We need a switch or an outlet - we just cut a hole right there and the wire's right there inside of it. If you turn this panel sideways you can see the red line and you can actually see the chase going all the way down through it.

Another big benefit of this being solid foam is it makes for a much quieter home, whether it's someone out with a lawn mower or a car driving by. It's a lot quieter in a SIP house. That solid foam also provides even thermal insulation throughout the exterior envelop of your home. Every inch of thickness has an estimated R-value of four to seven; R-value being the measure of resistance to thermal transfer. Jim LeRoy is a member of the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA) (253-858-7472) who's been constructing homes with SIPs for 15 years. He's on site to help us build the home with components supplied by the APA, the Engineered Wood Association. Jim says after building homes with SIPs for 15 years he wouldn't build a home any other way.

Jim LeRoy: Well, one of the things that I think that is important to builders is the site time - the amount of time necessary on the site to erect a house. And that site time can be greatly reduce with structural insulated panels. When a pre-cut package arrives at the site most all the lengths are cut, the openings are cut, the pieces are measured and pre-measured and set to go off of CAD drawings so there's very little site work that has to be done of cutting.

MH: Baseplates are placed over foam insulation and attached to the perimeter of the foundation. Then each panel is set on a baseplate and locked into its neighboring panels.

JL: The tools needed are the same tools that most carpenters have in their tool boxes. Instead of building with one piece at a time we're building in four -foot modules. We're standing up four foot at a time.

MH: Because the roof panels are foam core too, there's no need to add insulation to your attic. In fact, you don't even have to include an attic in your design.

JL: Your entire shape of your house is your envelope. It's not a box with a hat on it. The full shape of your house is your interior environment. Therefore, many people incorporate these cathedral type spaces in their designs that we don't have to go to extra efforts to create these cathedral spaces.

MH: While building with SIPs creates a strong exterior shell with great thermal insulation it also gives you a home with much less air infiltration.

JL: The fact that the panels come in four foot, sometimes eight foot wide sections we have fewer seams. Therefore, few opportunities for air infiltration. As we assemble the product the air infiltration problems are taken care of themselves. So, we have a very, very, very tight structure.

MH: A very tight structure plus well insulated walls and roof panels add up to an extremely energy-efficient home. Building your home with SIPs can save you up to 50% on your utility bills.

JL: Energy efficiency is obviously one of the great by-products of this building system. It's the heart of the system. There is some great documentation each manufacturer has follow-ups from clients that are living in houses that are just incredible.

MH: Since we're building this home with the Engineered Wood Association we decided to use I-joists for all of our floor trusses instead of 2x12's. An I-joist is much, much stronger than a 2x12 because it's oriented strand board between two solid pieces of wood. That means that it won't warp at a later date so our floor's not going to squeak when you get up for that midnight snack. Don't want to wake up your significant other. Another big benefit of an I-joist is that we can cover much greater spans. We can have an open feel to the whole house 'cause we don't need as many walls to support the second floor of the home. Finally, we had to ask - is it as easy to build with structural insulated panels as it looks.

JL: I like to use the word simple rather than easy. It's a simple process. It isn't easy. There's still pieces of carriage, still pieces to stand up, but it's not difficult.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE COPY

Building With SIPs

Structural insulated panels can lead you into new tool territory

By Jim LeRoy with Ted Cushman

Hanley-Wood's Tools of the Trade, January/February 1999

Panels are versatile. You can build an entire panel house, or just use panels for particular building elements. You can order raw panels in up to 8-by-24-foot sizes, and cut and shape them yourself, or you can order prefabricated panels from the manufacturer or from a panel processing specialist like my company.

If it’s your first experience with panels, I generally advise buying precut panels. But even a precut package may need some tweaking – a little trimming to make the panels fit just right, and some custom routing for rough wiring. Last-minute changes can also be handled on site if they’re not too extreme. In this article, I’ll go over the specializzed tools you’ll want to have on site when you set up a panel house (or just build a panel roof or dormer).

A Minimum Setup

The two basic parts of working with panels are cutting the panels to the right size and shape, and removing foam where you have to insert splines or reinforcement. Beyond that, there’s some fastening involved: We power-staple or power-nail panel edges to splines, and use long, epoxy-coated screws to connect panels at corners and fasten panels to supporting beams and purlins. (Instead of these specialty screws, some builders use polebarn spikes.)

For cutting and fastening on site, you can get by with the same tools you probably use for stick-framing. Cut the panels with any circular saw, turning the panel over to cut from both sides and finishing the cut with a hand saw or reciprocating saw if the circular saw blade doesn’t reach the panel center. Fastening calls for a good screw gun – or, if you use spikes, a big hammer.

Remodeler Jim Ross plunge -cuts from both sides with a 7 ¼ -inch cirular saw to make a skylight opening in the center of the panel (left). He finishes the cut with a reciprocating saw (middle) and pushes the scrap piece out (right). Ross' simple shop and site setup lets him dry in a room addition in two days - wiring, windows, and all.

But you still will need to remove foam for joints, and for that you’ll need some sort of hot melt device – a hot knife or foam scoop, what we call a "burner." The foam scoop we use on site sells for $83 and comes from L&H Branders in North Dakota. The manufacturer’s main business is making branding irons for livestock – the foam scoops are just a sideline. We buy them by the dozen for our crews, and sell the extras individually to contractors.

By the way, the panels we use have an expanded polystyrene (EPS) core. EPS panels predominate in the industry, but some panels are still made with polyurethane, the denser, higher-R, yellowish foam you see in foil-faced insulation board. Polyurethane is not a thermoplastic and doesn’t melt, so it isn’t practical to shape it with hot knives. If you use urethane panels, you’ll need to rout instead of melting (and be prepared for some unpleasant dust). Routers such as the ones we use in the shop, or a suitable bit on any heavy-duty router, work for removing urethane foam at panel edges.

Customized Routers

For shop work, the foam scoop we use on site is too slow. Instead, we’ve created a power tool to rout for splines by adapting an 8-inch Makita body grinder that sells for $150. We mount an aluminum table onto the grinder body using machine screws longer than the ones that the tool comes with. Then we take a piece of one-inch steel dowel, in a length that matches the panel thickness, and have a machine shop drill and tap the dowel so it can screw onto the grinder mount. We weld steel paddles onto this shaft to conform to the shape of any grooves we need to make in the panel joint.

These grinders are efficient and accurate for work in the shop, but they’re messy on the road. So on site we prefer to melt the foam, in spite of the odor.

For site adjustments, Panel Pros crews use an electric foam scoop to melt away foam. In the shop, they use use a modified Makita grinder with specially made base plate and cutting head (above, both photos). The custom routing tool is fast and accurate, but messy.

The Hot-Wire Solution

In the foam manufacturing industry, large billets of foam are cut into usable shapes with a variety of industrial hot-knife and hot-wire assemblies. The EIFS (exterior insulation finish system) industry has also developed specialized tools for cutting decorative shapes in foam; some of these are adaptable for panel work. One source for these advanced foam-working tools and hot-wire tables is the print or online catalog of Demand Products.

Demand Products also supplies the nickel/chrome or Ni-chrome wire some contractors use to rig their own hot-wire foam-cutting tools. An example is the setup that remodeler Jim Ross, of thermcore in Columbus, Ohio, uses for both shop and site work.

Ross’ foam cutter consists of a Ni-chrome thermal wire strung on a wooden frame, with power supplied by a surplus transformer/rheostat. Thermcore relies on a simple 2x splining systems, and the hot-wire frames make quick work of the foam cuts with no messy beads to sweep up. On the downside, using the tool does take two people.

Remodeler Ross has created a custom hot-wire frame to make the cuts for his simple 2x spline system. the rig is fast and neat but takes two workers to handle. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a commercial supplier for this tool.

Advanced Cutting Tools

Standard SIPs come in 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-inch thicknesses, with the inside dimensions (the foam thicknesses) corresponding to the standard depth of 2x4, 2x6, 2x8, and 2x10 dimensional lumber. Due to lumber dimension variations, we prefer engineered lumber for splining and reinforcing 10-inch panels.

To cut such thick panels in one pass, you need a big tool. You also need a tool that makes accurate square and bevel cuts, and maintains the angle you set it at. The squareness of your cuts is important because there could be half a dozen joints in a long wall or roof. If each cut is a hair under 90 degrees, one side of each joint will gap out and the wall could wind up growing ¾ inch by the time you reach the corner. The more accurate your cuts, the better.

We use big circular saws for some long straight cuts. We have a 16-inch Makita sidewinder that can cut a 4-inch panel in one pass, but even that won’t cut a 6-inch on the square. One of our trucks also carries a Mafell circular saw that can cut a 6-inch panel.

Mafell makes power equipment for timber framers, including portable circular saws with up to 6 ½ -inch cut depths. The company also makes big two-man saws that run on three-phase power and can cross-cut a 9 ½ -inch beam. Mafell tools, designed for cutting heavy wood, have more than enough torque to zip through SIPs. A Mafell saw costs well up into the thousands, but it’s a lifetime tool.

Hybrid Saws

Using a monster-size circular saw is only one way to make deep cuts. A lower-cost option, and the strategy we’ve come to rely on, is to use some sort of chain-saw/circular-saw hybrid: a circular saw modified by grafting on a chain saw bar, or a chain saw modified by attaching a foot. We use a whole variety of tools in those two categories.

The Linear Link from from Muskegon Power Tools is a panel workhorse (left). In the shop, Panel Pros keeps several Linear Links set up at commonly used angles. A manual pump is used to keep the chain and bar continuously oiled.

The timber-framer’s standby, the Linear Link, is one of our standard tools. This tool is based on the Skil wormdrive saw, but Muskegon Power tools replaces the standard 7 ¼ -inch blade with a chain saw bar. This provides enough depth to make most of the cuts needed in panel construction. In the shop, we keep several Linear Links set up at commonly used angles for miter cuts: 45 degrees, 22 ½ degrees, and so on. For steeper angels – for instance, a ridge cut on roof panels for pitches greater than 12/12 – we bolt a wooden wedge to the Linear Link’s foot.

We bring the Linear Link to job sites, but in addition we have a Prazi Beam Cutter in every truck. The Prazi is a quick-conversion add-on that you can use to graft a chain-saw blade onto a circular saw. It’s a convenient backup when a Linear Link breaks down. Just attach it to any 7 ¼ -inch circular saw and you are back in business.

The limitation to the Prazis is that we burn them out quickly. They’ll get us through one job, but we don’t rely onthem to produce house after house. And unlike the Linear Links, which have a continuous oiling mechanism for the chain, Prazis don’t have automatic oiling. When you use the Prazi, you have to keep bar grease and an oil can handy, and stop a lot to manually lubricate the tool.

Chain-Saw-Based Hybrids

More powerful and faster than either the Prazi or the Linear Link are the modified chain saws. We customize both gasoline-fueled and electric chain saws for panel work by attaching a foot or base-plate to the bar of the tool.

There’s a manufactured product called the Beam Boss that sells through Bailey’s mail-order catalog for just $49. The Beam Boss attaches to a chain-saw bar with set screws. The plate tilts to as sharp a 45-degree angle for miter cuts.

We like the Beam Boss, but we have found we can improve it by bolting on a larger aluminum plate to make the foot bigger. This gives the tool more stability. Also, a handle attached to our custom foot lets us pull the saw through the cut for added control – with the extra benefit that the chain cuts down through the work, allowing us to see the cut line as we go.

Panel Pros' modified Beam Boss includes a custom aluminum base plate with handle (top). The handle lets the worker pull the saw through the work, allowing greater control and visibility of the cut line (middle). The Beam Boss is also great for - suprise - beams (bottom).

We also custom-rig an even more rugged chain-saw setup by bolting our own custom-made aluminum plate assembly directly to the saw bar. We drill holes in the bar and through-bolt the mount securely. A gas-powered chain saw customized in this way makes short work of miter cuts on very thick panels.

With the addition of either the Beam Boss or a custom miter table, the modified chain saw is an inexpensive but effective tool. The electric chain saw we use is a low-end McCullough that cost $89 at a home center. These saws do break, but it’s usually just a plastic gear that wears out. Twelve bucks for the gear, and 15 minutes for the repair, and the saw lives on. If you’re putting together a panel-builder starter kit, the McCullough chain saw with a standard Beam Boss gives you good bang for your buck.

Gas chain saws are even more powerful than electric, though of course more tricky to control. Any of these chain saws and chain-equipped circular saws, with their long exposed blades, create a special risk to the user. We only put these tools in the hands of skilled carpenters, and they’ve never caused an injury – so far. Caution is strongly advised.

A Panel-Ready World?

Structural insulated panels have a track record of many decades, but the industry is still small enough that specialized SIP tools aren’t found in every hardware store. If you want to build with SIPs on site, order a precut package and you’ll be fine using mostly the tools you already own. But if you’re going to do a lot of fabricating yourself, you may have to be a little more creative. Good luck!

Jim LeRoy is the owner of Panel Pros, a full-service panel processing and erecting firm headquartered in Westmoreland, NH. Ted Cushman is a photojournalisst and editor. LeRoy and Cushman are currently at work on a how-to book about SIP construction.

Mafell North America
716-626-9303
www.mafell.com
Heavy-duty circular saws 

Muskegon Power Tool
800-635-5465
www.airguns-international.com/linear
Linear Link saw conversion kit 

Prazi
800-262-0211
www.praziusa.com
Beam Cutter circular saw adapter 

Bailey’s
Laytonville, CA 95454
707-984-6133
www.bbaileys.com
Beam Boss chain-saw adapter 

Demand Products
800-325-7540
www.demandproducts.com
Ni-Chrome wire, control boxes, and hot knives 

Wind-lock Corp.
800-521-9255
Hot knives

Attention Architects
and Engineers:
Panel Pros is trained to present the SIPA-AIA – Accredited Course
1 Hour Credit
For more information about scheduling:
Zack@panelpros.com

Residential Design and Construction
World Trade Center
Boston, MA
April 2-3 2008
Booth #321