Mission Statement

He is about making better, faster, affordable housing and shelter available to more people in many more places throughout the world, putting people to work providing it and continually working to find newer, better ways to do things. It’s headed up by a now 65 year old man who believes he invented foldout and double-wide mobile homes…Tony Ruiz, who ran away from home at 16 during his high school junior year to find fame and fortune in building design and construction, finding neither. As a young boy, he’d seen Alside Aluminum’s idea for prefab housing; the excitement and euphoria about new and better ways to build never left the forefront of his mind. He would later learn that the environment is the single most important early influence in people’s lives. He would become a crusader, inventor, innovator and visionary in building technology in lieu of business acumen. He spent about an hour with Frank Lloyd Wright and planned to attend Taliesin program, but he died 2 weeks later.

At 20, he worked for a Santa Ana, California group using Kraft honeycomb paper core drywall “HofKor” floor, wall and roof panels for apartment buildings and houses.

At 30, in Manufactured Housing Associates, worked with an old friend in innovative, still viable panelized methods based on conventional wood framing, ‘wet’ bath-kitchen cores and trusses.

At about 40, he saw sections of giant concrete pipe and envisioned precasting them using lightweight concrete cut in half, stacked nested style for shipping, and set up Quonset-hut style housing until learning that few would accept t confining space. A famous world-class structural engineer partnered with him, straightening out the wall and roof to form bent “L” panels that formed wall and half roof sections of that met at the “peak” or ridge.

His “3-Hinged Arch” method was short-lived when he found these solid concrete shapes too heavy, too reinforced, material and labor intensive, expensive and took too long to manufacture. Outside of these things, they were good…good for nothing. He designed and built a state of the art duplex in Santa Ana, California using t system that led him to consider alternative materials and methods to accomplish the same thing; He put that together with how concrete bonds to galvanized metal and came up with Composite Thinshell, a name he coined.

He'd started to work with a missionary group in Hawaii using original 3HA product and redirected their attention to Thinshell, designing a building a first project using t method for the walls, floors and roof on a house in Kona. He used used corrugated metal to form thin concrete roof panels, miming the rusting corrugated metal roofs in the area, then realized t method stood alone and shelved the 3HA. A large two-story dormitory building in Honolulu followed, coming in under time and budget. The school gave him a tip (not a racehorse) in addition to $24,000 construction management fee. That tip was $50,000, and remains unheard of today.

The fledgling Thinshell technology became an upstart in the building industry, and millions of square feet of it now stand throughout the world. He went to Turkey with part of that same early missionary group after the big ’99 earthquake there, building two school buildings in 13 days with 30 American volunteers. Small, secure mountaintop equipment enclosures, houses, schools, commercial, institutional, industrial and high rise buildings have all been and are being done with many thinshell methods that eclipse his own work.

But two threads are common to all his work. Lack of capital and financial success. He's given away, been plagiarized, robbed, conned, swindled promised and embezzled from. But the innovation continues, and appetite for more, better and less expensive buildings remains unfettered. Newer materials, methods, tools and equipment all contribute to a field rich for farming new building technology for the masses. Much of this can spill over to the American housing dilemma, although the typical American buyer is fickle and demanding. Well known and accepted building changes are slow to be implemented and accepted. Skyrocketing land, development and governmentally imposed costs and fees have kept affordable housing in the extinct species category over the decades.

Where do we go from here? specifically, where does SBS go from here? He has knowledge of and access to many new and improved materials and people behind them. Some remain undiscovered, unexploited and unproven but therein lies his path. He continues to work with the current struggling company he founded using a third generation of Thinshell building method. After prior debacle with second generation MetalCrete and prior to SteelCrete, he returned to residential development where two cities in a row reneged on their engineering departments’ requirements for the development of two sites that took their toll, resulting in the deterioration of credit and accompanying dramatic increase in interest rates he parlayed into a Jamul, California property where a unscrupulous realtor interrupted a series of steps designed for our financial recovery. The first two of three homes were built with expensive hard money loans, and the IRS cleaned him out from the sale of the second.

With little money available to pursue and develop new and improved ideas, he was able to launch the current corporation, which built a beautiful 4,000 square foot house on the remaining lot. Plainly some of Ruiz' time should be spent helping develop and launch others’ new and improved technology, some of which is based on original work. One of the concepts he had was to develop the Yahoo! of the construction industry. Using the acronym for Architecture, Engineering and Construction founded AECinnovation.com and launched an original website he retracted when he realized he lacked the capital to back it up.

The website would showcase only new and innovative construction related technology, giving the industry a central point of collection and dissemination of information for new building systems, materials and equipment. But the dye is cast and this is one of the company objectives. He developed a technology using the new SIPS technology for the regeneration of his 3 Hinged Arch using these lightweight, low technology load-bearing panels to meet needs for instant disaster relief shelter, migrant farm worker housing, and third world shelter at extremely low cost using unskilled labor with semi-skilled supervision. He introduced t technology to the ministry preparing to go to Liberia for groups of as many as 40,000 houses at a time.

Former SBS management failed to prepare SteelCrete for market by stopping short of obtaining a UBC (Uniform Building Code) approval. T would have cost little to finalize then, but costs considerably more now. It isn’t required by architects and engineers to use SteelCrete, but makes it substantially more desirable. He obtained t testing and approval for MetalCrete, his predecessor to SteelCrete he left in the hands of what he believes are unscrupulous ex-partners.

He's identified emerging new concrete and composite materials that promise to change the way buildings are built. He has also identified new thinshell programs that will help ensure the success of company that include extremely lightweight concrete for residential work and other specialty concrete to accomplish a variety of different objectives. I am also working with a Canadian group who licensed his original thinshell system some 25 years ago, but are also experts in metal stud production and precasting operations, all of which will serve to establish SBS with an even stronger industry market position.