He ran away from home at 16, becoming a draftsman for a fold-out home manufacturer
and applying that concept to mobile homes that was stolen by a large mobile
home manufacturer. Shortly after that, invented the double-wide mobile
home concept he didn’t know how to market either, but it soon replaced
the market for the folding mobile home industry he started. He didn’t know
what patents were.
He conceived a new concept for precast concrete housing using a Quonset
hut design principle interpreted in half-shells joined at the top known
as the structural principle of the "Three Hinged Arch." These
were 8' wide, 8' high wall, 4" thick precast concrete panels. Then
engineer-partner William Simpson recognized they could use straight vertical
wall with half-gable roof sections joined at the ridge where steel channel
had been embedded with alternating welded sections of 1/2" pipe a
rod was inserted, creating a literal hinge. Heavy rebar mats were used
to resist tremendous loads at the knee. These "cells" were repeated
creating living space. The panels were cast on-edge, nested neatly on truck
trailers and transported to the jobsite where a two-point lift crane would
lift each panel vertically as the second, center of gravity lift points
would take over, rotating each panel to its proper orientation for installation.
Panels were heavy, required intensive QC and were no breakthrough in the
end analysis.
But he tried lighter, simpler bent "L" shaped half-shells using
thin concrete with partially embedded metal framing. This building technology
is original but is based on two conventional building resources in conventional
concrete and light gauge metal framing used together in a totally new and
unconventional way beginning with a "deformed" flange edge he
had custom-rolled for him and was embedded about 3/4" into 1 1/2"
thick concrete. He used the word "Thinshell" for this technology
and soon decided on simple individual wall, floor and roof panels with
conventional gable roofs that allow lighter, cheaper, faster and stronger
buildings of all sizes and types and cost less than a Colorado metal building
manufacturer's product advertised by Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey.
He applied the half-shell concept to newer, lighter materials and discovered
a simple new, fast, cheap method of enclosing space differently using insulated
SIPS panels whose technology is fully developed and marketed and widely
used.
His rolling mill began to gouge him and his licensees and he abandoned
the deformed flange method and invented Metalcrete (aka MetalStudCrete)
so he could use standard metal stud materials and as in the case of the
other systems he invented it, wrote the patent text, named it, recruited
the people he worked with and established the product. His Composite Building
Systems Inc (CBSI) was absorbed by Los Angeles based builder and developer
Ben Earl of the Earl Corporation and became Earl Composite Systems Inc.
But Ruiz' poor partner choices had prevailed and he left to develop SteelCrete
and Simple Building Solutions where he seeks a similar relationship with
a national or multi-national entity to take all the newest of Ruiz' technology
to a level now so easily attainable with proper backing and capital. His
former Metalcrete is wildly successful, another early licensee Smith-Midland
is publicly traded using Slenderwall, a similar product. Ruiz' affiliation
with TMCP Building Systems of Toronto Canada promises to eclipse the Thinshell
market with high-tech, low-cost housing that is energy independent and
Hydrogen cell equipped for home and transportation fuel use. Both Ruiz
and TMCP's Ernie Bodnar are working with Gigacrete's Andrew Dennis for
even further, more dramatic solutions for both load-bearing and non-load-bearing
cladding applications for housing to high-rise.
