Florida Construction News staff writer
In this era of skilled labour shortages, tariffs and inflated building material costs, A-1 Industries’ EZWALL® panel framing package offers timely and affordable solutions.
The residential and commercial wall framing system uses an innovative production method that reduces demand for labour, and squeezes the time needed to complete projects big and small. It also minimizes lumber waste, with up to 20 per cent of wood discarded under conventional prefabricated panel and stick framing methods — material that must be hauled from worksites at a cost of up to $600 per load.
Under the EZWALL® system, usable defective pieces or scraps are salvaged; others are ground up for shavings, landscape mulch, or papermaking. The process recovers more than three truckloads — or more than $100,000 in product — each month.
According to A-1’s Wall Panel Design Manager and Senior Truss Designer Lenny Amato, EZWALL® “takes away the cut man and the layout guy and speeds up the process cycle time by 20 per cent.” There’s no need for a cutter in the field or a worker laying out plates and marking stud locations since panels are precut at A-1 facilities but not yet assembled to allow for easy adjustments on the worksite.
The process begins with extensive customer consultations among EZWALL® Framing Solutions’ design teams who load customer specifications on to proprietary software that visualizes layouts and shop drawings in two and three dimensions down to the last stud.
State-of-the-art saws at A-1 facilities in Florida and Georgia precision cut each piece, with components labelled and bundled in wall panel kits that are shipped to work sites for fast assembly by existing framing staff.
A-1’s dedicated truck fleet and its lumber mill direct relationships assure on time delivery, while the factory pre-cutting eliminates weather-related delays and limits the potential for sawing injuries on the construction site.
“We deliver EZWALL® with virtually no waste, and we see a plethora of products in our future that we can manufacture off-site and deliver,” said John Herring, CEO and Chairman of A-1 Industries’ parent company A-1 Global Holdings, Inc. Herring has helped build A-1 into the premier truss supplier in the southeastern U.S., with the company ranking in the top 5 per cent of single-site producers nationwide for quality and efficiency.
“When these products are manufactured off-site in the plant, we use every bit of fiber in the wood. What doesn’t go into a truss or a wall, we grind and sell, or it goes into landscaping mulch,” Herring said.
The process means that two detached, single-family homes can be built in the time it would take to build one using stick framing or preassembled methods that have been a staple for decades. Framing crews familiar with EZWALL® can drive even greater framing efficiencies so that eight panels can be assembled in the time needed to build six using traditional stick framing methods, A-1 says.
That means more homes and more profit for builders and framers. “You can be moving on to the next house,” Amato said, “whereas with stick framing you’d still be framing on the first one.” The system with its savings in labour and time versus the more traditional wall panel construction process is the brain child of Herring who came up with the notion of building components in pre-cut kits that can be assembled by framers in the field rather than at a wall assembly plant to mitigate against field sawing while allowing leeway for adjustments. As such, EZWALL® offers multitiered customer advantages versus fabricated paneling and stick framing where walls are built on-site, and excess wood is tossed into a dumpster for haulage to landfill.
The system also provides unique flexibility since Build Faster, Waste Less: A-1’s EZWALL® Rethinks Wall Framing Florida Construction News — SPRING 2025 – 9 components are packaged in bundles in the order they are to be used for on-site assembly. Amato, who has overseen development of the system over the past three and a half years, said unlike prefabricated wall panel systems where panels must be torn apart and reassembled when an issue becomes apparent, EZWALL® allows for a quick fix to pre-assembled components. And off-site design and measurement can head off last minute change orders.
“When our design team is working on a project to create a layout and shop drawings, many times there are questions and plan related errors that our team catches before production,” Amato said. “This saves the framer time and headaches in the field when we catch these items up front as well as saving our customers money from costly and time-consuming errors.”
Owners and CEOs have recognized the benefit of EZWALL® for its cycle time and waste reduction, but framing workers have shown reluctance to embrace a system they view as a threat to their jobs, said A-1’s EZWALL® coordinator Hunter Szynalski .
“There are some alarms when we tell them you can frame an EZWALL® system with half the manpower, half the crew,” he added. A-1 asserts that workers can transition efficiently to subsequent projects without experiencing job loss, although some framers remain unconvinced. Many are stuck in their ways, Szynalski said, convinced that the tried and true is the best, even given the efficiency and simplicity of EZWALL®.
Owners have avoided alienating framers for fear they will bolt to conventional stick framing or panel jobs and leave them in the lurch. But Szynalski said indications of late suggest a turning of the tide, with President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented migrant workers a catalyst. He said as ICE raids targeting immigrants in the U.S. begin to affect the construction industry developers are acknowledging that skilled carpenters may not be as readily available moving forward.
“They’re starting to see that EZWALL® is a way to optimize labour at a time when there will be shortages.” During recent meetings with large, multi-family framing companies, Szynalski said owners expressed a desire to get out in front of gathering shortages, with framers starting to buy in as well. He also said that as the framing workforce ages, younger workers may be more likely to embrace the EZWALL® system, where cutting and measuring are done in the factory and at the design stage.
“All you have to do is understand the labels and the walls basically put themselves together,” Szynalski said. It is a simpler product to master compared to the traditional stick framing techniques typically employed by experienced carpenters.”
