Every once in a while I make my way upstairs to chat with the engineers only to be delighted with the knowledge that something we made is going up in my hometown. Nestled in a neighborhood in Clarence, NY is Brookfield Country Club—a place to play a friendly round, have a wedding, or if it was the 90s and you were a high schooler in Clarence, get a summer job. And soon, home to some New Energy Works' big a** trusses.

"I don't think I've ever seen tension numbers as high as these," said Owen MacDonald, EC Timber Frame Department Manager. 

"An incredible 71.6 kips (71,600 lbs)," replied Melissa Schmidt, Timber Frame Engineer.

And to deal with all of that tension these 50'6" trusses have a glulam bottom cord and hidden huge steel plates paired with traditional mortise and tenon joinery.

"The client wanted the timbers to work well with, yet contrast against, the cocoa T&G that they're using. So the Douglas fir solid timbers and glulams have a custom dark brown finish. This way the glulam blends even further into the truss, making it visually seamless," says Schmidt.

The New Energy Works timber trusses will be part of an expansion of the event space at the country club. The trusses sit atop steel beams and show off a massive 45' skylight that runs down the center of the space.

Delphi Falls Park is a public park in Madison County, NY. Originally private land with a residence and barn it became a park in August of 2018. Since then, the county has been working on expanding the park and upgrading buildings for better community use.

And that’s where we come in, as our team lead by Timber Frame Champion Jason Houtenbrink, has been on site over the last few weeks raising a timber frame visitors center, breezeway, and bathroom complex. 

“The site is the best part of the entire project,” says timber frame engineer Steve Gibbons who worked on the drawings of the frame. “The visitor’s center faces a waterfall, with a view from the inside of the center of the falls and a timber frame porch that allows people to enjoy the falls from a covered area.”

The main timber frame is a roof system, with custom finished Douglas fir queen post trusses and exposed steel that sit atop steel supports with a Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) roof. The blend of timber and exposed steel gives a lightness to the smaller interior space. Externally there is a full timber frame porch, in the same Douglas fir & custom finish, to blend the outside and in. The bathhouse is connected to the main visitor’s center by a timber frame breezeway joining the two buildings together.

The NEWBeamery trusses take a departure from the solid timber frame trusses that New Energy Works has been doing for nearly 40 years. Instead, these are glulams from our friends at American Laminators that we've “built up” into 90’ trusses and pre-assembled on site.

“We have parallel cords that run the bottom, parallel cords that run the top, sandwiching what are called the web members in-between,” Oliver Ogden, New Energy Works West Coast General Manager explains.

The truss design was inspired by the wood buildings Jonathan Orpin, New Energy Works Founder & CEO and coworker Kelsey Boyer visited on a discovery trip to Europe. “When they toured many facilities in Europe rather than having big solid-member trusses of wood or steel, they had created these ‘built up trusses’ with a lot of smaller members. So on one hand these trusses have this massive presence, but they also have a lightness to them. The web members are smaller dimensionally than if we just had one gigantic triangle with a couple cross pieces.”

These glulam trusses are arguably stronger than solid wood as well. The glue-up process uses layers of kiln-dried wood with glue between. This dried material, with the glue incorporated, makes the manufactured timbers strong and stable—without twisting as you would find in a natural timber. Orientation of grain and the amount of layers in a glulam add to the strength. Glulams can be made in larger sizes than you could find in today’s timbers.