MIAMI: Lindbäcks, a 90 year old company in northern Sweden, is truly taking modular construction to new heights, cranking out apartments, condos, student housing and seniors buildings a rate of twenty units per week. The modules are 4150 wide [13’-7”] and optimally 8950 [29’-4”] long. The modules look superficially like they are coming out of North American factories, but it is a very different product.
The level of automation in the factory is way beyond anything you see in North America, where framing is done in factories much like it is done in the field. Here it is “screen to machine” – wood is fed into giant patented machines that feed, align and fasten the framing, to any level of complexity. There are no drawings and no tape measures; it’s all automatic, cranking out a wall every seventeen minutes, including windows (in fact the windows are laid down and the wall framed around them) and insulation…..