Our Director of International Sales in Latin America, Cyndi Chandler, organized our annual sales seminar in Chile. This was a great opportunity to connect with our engineers and specifiers in Latin America and educate them about the various products and resources we offer. Learn more about this dynamic two-day seminar and the products we demonstrated in Chile.

I have been with Simpson Strong-Tie for 38 years, and I manage our team in Chile. Chile is our branch office and warehouse for South America. We try to plan a seminar related to wood and concrete every year or two in Chile, and it is typically held in the south of Chile or the Santiago area. This year the seminar was held both days at the Hotel BW Marina Las Condes, Santiago, Chile. We began the planning for this seminar very early on and planned for Simpson Strong-Tie presenters to fly out from our McKinney, Texas, branch. This included Simpson Strong-Tie branch engineer Keith Cullum and Zac Thick, a representative from our training department. We packed the agenda for this two-day seminar and modeled it on how we host these types of events in the United States.  

Our audience for this seminar included mainly engineers and technical sales representatives.  Our goal was to show what makes Simpson Strong-Tie different from our competition and showcase the variety of products we offer among anchors, epoxies, and FRP. The topic for the first day of this seminar was “Anchoring and Strengthening of Concrete and Masonry Structures,” which focused on our concrete products and fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) products. 

The second day’s topic was “Design and Construction of Wood Frame Structures,” focused on wood. A portion was dedicated to our new Chilean wood catalog and our newly launched products, connectors and fasteners for cross-laminated-timber (CLT) and other mass timber construction.

Lastly, we had our Simpson Strong-Tie presenters help facilitate time for some hands-on demonstrations of our products in real-time applications. We showed installations of our concrete products including Titen HD®, Titen Turbo™, SET-3G™ and SET-XP®.

We also had FRP installations (fabric, layup, column wrap, carbon anchors) and a fabric-reinforced cementitious matrix (FRCM) case study with fabric samples. We finished our demos by installing our H2.5A hurricane tie using SD9112 C Strong-Drive® SD Connector screws and our LUS210 joist hanger using nails. 

As for speakers for this presentation, we had a guest speaker who presented a case study on the ATS project Torre Peñuelas. His name was Francisco Hernández- an academic at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Chile and current director of the RENADIC National Accelerograph Network. His presentation focused on the low-cost seismic instrumentation in Torre Peñuelas. This was a Chilean case study of a building with shearwalls using the ATS Tie Down system and its dynamic response. We also had two other guest speakers- Gerardo Armanet Mena and Juan José Acevedo of Tallwood office, present the Mass Timber-Tallwood case study which focused on a twelve-story mass timber building.

Our hope for this event was to share product knowledge and give people a better understanding of the diversity of products we offer for a wide range of applications, along with the quality customer service we provide. We also wanted to let our audience be aware that we have local inventory in Chile, so specifiers can feel confident when specifying our products by name on their jobs. We had excellent feedback from this seminar, with several emails thanking us for how helpful they found it. As for future seminars, we will see what 2023 brings. We may have a seminar in the south or north of Chile next year, or maybe in Colombia, so stay tuned! 

If you are in Latin America, please check out our Chilean website that has many Spanish options for additional Simpson Strong-Tie resources, including our latest catalogs, flyers and more. You can also reach us at our Chilean number at (+56) 2 2760 2570 or chile@strongtie.com