The Boring Company and Elon Musk have been silent since 2018 regarding their Bricks. I sought to figure out why. My Patreon: / oliverbahl My Twitter: / bahlfranke
It's ancient innovation lol. Most modern drilling machine has facility who can mix dirt, sand, and water to cement the tunnel right after they dug it. Nothing new really
This is what I've been wondering about from the start. How often the material from a tunnel would be suitable for bricks and how they might sort material and discard the rubbish rocks and such? My dad worked in tunnel construction when I was a kid and I've seen a muck pile or two. Its wide range of soils and rock, silicates and such usually even on just one major project. An awful lot of what comes out of the ground isn't suitable for brick making.
@@mersenne2486 Maybe not? My dad had several jobs but his longest was working as a construction inspector for Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation. As such he worked on many different types of water projects such as dam's, canal systems, and indeed tunnels. When I was very young I got to visit the water system tunnel he was working on at that time. It made quite an impression on me with the immense size of the entire project and the equipment used and such. Quite an impressive take your kid to work day. lol But what was the point of your question.....??
I don't think that they abandoned the project. I just think it's something for a later date once the more pressing matters of tunneling speed, automating wall building, material extraction etc are handled and I also think the viability(targeted price point/value) rises the more projects they have and the larger these are. It's probably a waste of time for them to focus on that right now and its a better idea to get their operations streamlined and by the time they have done that and start operating on a large scale, previous iterations of the bricks production may become obsolete so they might as well think about it at the end.
It's just clickbait the boring company still doesn't have enough work to produce a steady supply of bricks since the boring company is a tunneling company.
A real journalist would have taken 10 minutes to call them, and ask them.... instead he seemingly spent hours searching the web, and has nothing but speculation to show for it.
Reuse of excavated material is a wonderful idea but difficult to implement. It’s more likely to be used as general fill instead of bricks which require a strict recipe.
Did you consider just e-mailing and/or calling the Boring Company to ask them what the current state on their brick production is and future brick production plans are?
While I was aware of these bricks I had never given them a second thought. Now because of this video I will be lying awake all night wondering whatever became of them. Thanks OBF.
@@davidbeppler3032 Without emergency exits or escape tunnel, no fire suppression system and so narrow that you can barely walk past a standard size car in the tunnel, that makes it cheaper. If you're referring to the "Vegas loop" about being on time, it's still not built as promised. There should be autonomous 12 pax "cars", there isn't and the speed and pax/h capacity is nowhere near what Musk said before.
I think it's worth keeping in mind WHY Boring Co was planning on producing bricks. . . to eliminate the cost of disposing of the spoils. That means if the cost of traditional disposal is low enough, or demand for bricks is not adequate, it may make economic sense to skip the brick making process and save on the labor and capital costs. I assume landfill space is not exactly at a premium in Las Vegas. For a project in California however, that calculus might be different!
There is a constant (and huge) demand for fill on construction sites. The last project I was associated with made more money selling the fill than from the project itself.
There could also be regulatory requirements for the bricks. testing and such for a new building material. and because the dirt that they are using for the bricks is not consistent then there could be regulatory problems with using them for construction.
Bricks have to meet ASTM C62-17. There's not a chance in hell that anysignificant amount of the dirt he's digging out of those tunnels is going to meet that specification.
@@joecummings1260 I am by no means an expert in the field of brick making. Would these bricks have different standards from a concrete additive? This might be a stupid question but I really would like to understand more about how these bricks would and could be classified.
@@jordanwanberg753 they actually would be considered "compressed Earth blocks" and are typically of lower strength then actual bricks. Still only certain types of soil can be used to manufacture them, and yes Portland cement can be added into the mix to increase strength, but it also significantly increases cost. This Wikipedia page gives a brief overview about them. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_earth_block
I figured the same thing. Any material you dig out can be used for something but materials to make bricks is not found everywhere. They should have been more careful on this expo.
Excellent video, I appreciate your work and competent fact checking! You should keep a list of updates and thoughts and do an update someday to this "unsolved mystery".
Great Video - I came here looking for the same answer. I'm guessing the answer is down to ground conditions as you've alluded to. Example - In London, the ground contains virtually no rock, it's almost entirely clay so perfect for making bricks. However in the next big city of Manchester the ground is solid sandstone. An ideal candidate for skyscrapers and tunnels. My guess is that they will approach each tunnel case by case basis, where clay and dirt exists they will make bricks; where solid rock exists, they will maybe grind it up and use it as an aggregate for the concrete ring segments. If they are tunneling through limestone, they could produce the cement and aggregates from the bored limestone and then sell the excess material onto the market
The whole brick idea is obviously one of optimism with regards to upcycling waste from someone who isn't familiar with the existing problem. First being, the waste material from the boring tunnels the world over are going to be all sorts of different types of soil. Gravel, Sand, Silt, and Clay. You can't make bricks out of material you haven't tested rigorously. You can't make bricks out of material that isn't consistent. You can't make "bricks" out of anything besides clay. You can make masonry block out of anything, but you are going to need cement. Cement as we know is a very carbon heavy process. You are actually putting way more carbon in the air then you would putting the waste in a truck and sending it to a landfill. As the boring company disturbs soil the world over it won't be getting Las Vegas sand everywhere. They will eventually hit plenty of things that they can't make bricks out of. Plenty of new brick designs will need to be taken representing the new soil. What you *could* do is a "Soil Cement Amendment" and sort of 3D print the tube as you go. You would still need to toss what you can't use, but you would be driving through a tube like the middle of a cinderblock. That would be a win-win. You would need to separate the materials anyway. You get a mix design or several and use the appropriate one. Meanwhile you have separated the soils into "cleaner" materials and when you have enough to sell in bulk you sell that as a material instead. Making pavers out of the waste makes the most sense as you wouldn't need to engineer it. Just call them Tesla Engineered Patios and watch Home Depot and watch Home Depot fall over themselves paying 10x the price of any other paver.
they have tested the made bricks for compression by forcing them into a hydraulic press when forming probably with a geotextile strengthening. Any bricks that has failed is weeded out. This will give a defined compressive strength that all bricks meet. 3d printing tunnels would be a nightmare the needed viscosity would wreck the compressive strength but your right it is doable but not much different from a sprayed system available. Your argument for pavers falls apart from your beginning statements that it would be hard to make consistent mixes required for a consumer goods. For me the issue is durablitity of a dry mix and like you mention carbon impact of cement for a wet mix. i always liked the idea of rammed earth and ground anchors but that has its own problems
they should try mixing some straw into the bricks. This will make them more like adobe bricks, add 20-30% volume and add a carbon sequestration component to the bricks. As long as those adobe bricks are standing, the carbon in that straw is removed from the atmospheric carbon cycle.
As with all other Elon projects over the last two decades, it makes more sense in the context of building a colony on Mars. Despite its mythical Earth based creation legend, the boring companies long term goal is making tunnels on Mars. Glass domed cities are great for science fiction art, but they aren't very effective at protecting humans from cosmic rays. Humans will want to spend most of their time under many meters of rock. Mars has huge lava tubes, but there will need to be many tunnels to connect them to each other and to infrastructure on the surface. You don't want cities in the same lava tube as industrial scale LOX and liquified methane production plants. The city should be separated from the explodey stuff by serpentine tunnels with blast doors, and pressure relief ports. A city needs a great deal of infrastructure at the surface. Bricks are great for building that infrastructure. There will need to be large solar farms for energy production, and large radiator arrays to get rid of waste heat. The majority of tunneling will be in mining operations. I suspect that there will be a huge increase in brick research after the first Martian samples return to Earth. Also, building housing for people on Earth is a great justification for learning how to turn tunneling waste into construction material on a large scale.
SpaceX's long term goal is not making tunnels on Mars. It is making us a multiplanetary species. You are jumping to a conclusion if you think bricks are needed.
@@jbbuzzable SpaceX to get them there Boring Company to set up shop, got to have the place to live as an interplanetary species Johnny the bricks are just turning a waste into a product we can always find plenty of things to do with bricks latter.
I mean, it’s okay to tackle one problem at a time, especially for a startup. Step 1) learn how to dig tunnels cheaply, step 2) make cheap bricks out of the tunneling byproduct, step 3) profit
The problem there is that half the tunneling cost goes to soil removal. Brick idea is there for reduced costs by reselling the material. Unless soil is perfect for brick making this was never going to happen. Just the usual Elon scammy overpromising while severly underdelivering.
From your research are there any announced upcoming projects of the Boring company where me might see their 2.0 Bricks. Also what’s the name of the song you used from 2:22-3:16? Thanks for the informative video, the mystery continues, maybe Elon lost interest in Boring Bricks.
I don't think we have any projects that are announced (that I know of at least) where the soil would be optimal for bricks. Although I could be wrong. And the song is named "In the gloom" by Michael Rothery. It's on Epidemic Sounds (where all my music is from).
@@mcRydes - limestone is even better, though, as it is used for cement - which in turn is used in both concrete and mortar. It should be a much better revenue stream that bricks.
My one point i want to get clear What material they have used to make the brick? You said like clay ,sand,dirt Even Elon said they are using dirt. What dirt they are using?
IRC nature makes clay as nitric acid from lighting and air dissolve rocks this could be sped up with higher acid levels in batch tanks with all that crushed rock/muck but I don't think Elon is going to do that.
Great video, but please get rid of the white screens in your videos they are blinding to see at night please use longer videos or black screen for your cuts ;)
I'm dumbfounded by the fact that the whole channel audience missed what they craved so long - a whole video about bricks! They should all watch it and send it to HAI comments just for the lulz
The musk boring machines are to small for anything in the long term. The only thing I can think of is for underground hyperloop or to fit in a rocket to tunnel on the moon and Mars. Instead of making bricks they should rise ground level around the world when tunnel boring.
I wonder if the blocks you identified as commercial blocks were actually boring company blocks made with different machinery that’s my guess Elon never said they were only going to make one kind of brick there are hundreds of possible variations
Depending upon the composition of the clay, firing bricks generates significant noxious flue gases which are difficult to capture. There are numerous white papers and other publications regarding this challenge on the web. Most of the Victorian and Georgian houses in the UK were built using clay excavated and fired on site, but this type of activity is now banned in cities. We are doing cutting edge innovation in this area, so do please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on eco friendly brick or clay 3D printing...
The great brick mystery. Maybe they are dumping them in the ocean like they do with the Model 3s 😜. You are asking some great questions. Stay curious and keep making these videos!
Hi there Oliver! Your videos are great. But what's the idea with the white screen? Just a suggestion, get rid of it. All the rest is very nice! Congrats!
Thank you! And regarding the white screens. I've found that my audience retention is much higher when I have the screen go white once I either need to make an important point or when changing to a different subject. So it is completely intentional.
You missed the real 'bricks' and focused on the blocks forming a containment cell. Look higher up in the picture for big curved bricks. Yes, tunnel segments.
I make compression bricks and I can confirm that the material used is extremely important. It has to have the perfect amount of sand, dirt and clay. Too much clay and they eventually crack. Too much sand and they crumble before drying. It's a very scientific process.
Well, he said that in the video. He bought it off eBay from one of the engineers that worked on the project. Apparently Elon wasn't pleased with how they looked so he just gave the bricks to those who worked on the project.
Next time, take a look at Elon's claim of boring tunnels ten times cheaper or faster. He's just using off-the-shelf technology. The answer could be that he's only boring tiny and utterly useless tunnels which can easily turn into death-traps for many people when it all goes wrong. In my view, you can only compare tunnel boring costs by diameter. Don't put your money into any idea of musks that involves a tube of ANY kind, a tunnel of ANY kind, or an electric plane of ANY kind. He's been OK, at replicating and commercializing NASA technology from back in 1995 with the DC-X tail-landing booster, and he seems to have a fairly-reliable LEO rocket system in Falcon 9, which might be slightly cheaper than disposable rockets -- only time will tell. It's a totally traditional rocket, and we know those tend to work. Starship is a fantastic idea, in theory, but they are never going to turn around like he says they will. More to the point, how do you trust a bunch of Raptor engines which have vacuum-welded and cold-soaked themselves for months on end, in space? Turbo pumps are crappy things, and that is why no rockets with them have ever been used by NASA in space. Just pressure the tanks and open the valves, and off you go. Simple. Safe. Reliable. It is my fervent wish he makes Starship a raging success, and puts millions of tons of stuff on orbit, and sends thousands of tons of people and stuff to Mars. But I'll quote Elon here; "Reusable orbital rockets are hard.
Even at 50 cents a brick they would sell like hot cakes! The bricks shown in the video are more like cinder blocks rather than bricks. Those things go for $0.90-1.70 each unless you buy in massive quantities.
I wanted to share a concept for continuous tunneling. I'm trying to describe my thoughts on a novel process of "continuous helical tunnel boring" I think this kind of concept could speed the construction of a 3dimensional tunnel system that Elon Musk described exponentially. If there is anyone you could think of to share this idea with I would appreciate that. . Working from the premises that it is better to continuously "pour" the structural concrete tunnel walls rather than pausing the tunneling process to lay precast sections of wall. The area of operations we are then focusing on is the area directly behind the boring machine face and within the tunnel shield wall where we will have to transport materials for forming our tunnel wall from without the tunnel dig to the area of operations. These materials being a role of sandwiched basalt fiber fabric pre impregnated with high strength Portland cement, configured into a sleeve that when injected with wet concrete will create a continuous form laid in a spiral or helical manor along the tunnel wall and forming a negative worm gear. These roles can be transported to the area of operations by autonomous electric vehicle conveyance. The roles being of a fixed length must be connected end to end by a process of stitching by which the two ends are laid open and sown together as the material is being fed to the work surface. To do this without interrupting the whole process slack has to be fed towards the wall end in an inch worm fashion and then taken up again until the next seam is necessary. These rolls of basalt fiber fabric have a structural cross threading in a manner in which when filled with concrete they form a roughly T shaped extrusion creating both a structural concrete form and the inner teeth of the negative worm gear. These pre impregnated basalt fabric roles which both give structural form and act as structural forms for the wet concrete mix are key to continuously forming the walls of the tunnel. Two other main elements in this process are water and wet concrete mix both separately conveyed to the area of operations through high pressure hoses. It's important to note that ideally a concrete batching plant be located at the entrance to the tunnel and raw materials stockpiled so as to avoid delays in pouring that come from concrete mixing trucks being ironically stuck in traffic that the boring company is attempting to alleviate. Also that ideally spoil material from the tunnel would be mixed with this concrete and reconstituted as the walls of the tunnel. Raw water is needed to activate the impregnated basalt fabric and applying it is a tricky problem. I'm going to try to use an analogy to describe this process and the process of injecting the wet concrete into the fabric sleeve. We should all by now as I write this in the beginning of 2021 be familiar with the image of an intubation tube being inserted down the esophagus of a patient. In this case the intubation tube is the nozzle end of the concrete hose which is inserted in the fabric sleeve which is the esophagus of our patient. The nozzle is a two pant system with an inner hose reaching farther into the sleeve and an outer jacket even applies water to the inside of the fabric sleeve. Directionality of this tunnel wall system is achieved by the flexible nature of the fabric sleeved poured concrete rather than the traditional precast concrete block systems used today. The means of conveyance of the tunnel boring machine is achieved by an articulated tunnel shield which locks into the worm gear of the tunnel, screwing itself among with a multitude of industrial inhud electric drive wheels. Theses drive wheels are relatively low speed compared to electric car motors but harness the high torque and flexible geometry of electric drive systems. Working on this idea. The current limiting factor to tunnel construction is the placing of precast concrete tunnel segments. The above concept is an attempt to break from that system. Thanks for your time, keep up the good work.
Nice video on a subject that is a bit boring. I think it's a bad idea. It's cheaper to go to places where they have the right materials for bricks and quarry it. You could be able to use the material from boring through hard rock as part of the process to make paver style bricks, but that might be all that good of an idea either. I think that material is most often used for aggregate that is used in the tunnel which seems like a much better idea to me.
Normally, bricks contain the following ingredients:[21] Silica (sand) - 50% to 60% by weight Alumina (clay) - 20% to 30% by weight Lime - 2 to 5% by weight Iron oxide - ≤ 7% by weight Magnesia - less than 1% by weight
Elon will definitely continue with bricks. His Main goal is making our planet sustainablr and current building materials are some of the worlds worst polluters. Meanwhile these bricks are effectively carbon neutral and could also be used to sequestrate carbon.
Someone who wants to make the planet more sustainable wouldn't advertise for bitcoin. A currency which waste 120 terawatt hours. Every year. Through his Twitter messages the currency climbed 20. %. The additional co2 this will cause is more than all his cars will ever save.
Pay $400 for two 10c bricks. hmmm. It makes some sort of American/UA-cam sense I guess. Here is a fact: you can't make a brick for under 10-cents. Sorry. Not possible. It would be easy to sell bricks at 10-cents each if they were certified as load-bearing. But bricks today aren't for building - that is dumb stuff. Bricks go on the INSIDE of a building, and INSIDE the insulation, not the outside! As a building material bricks are poor. If your house is brick, it's a danger to you. Period. But, if you have bricks inside tied to the structure, as thermal mass, then you're using bricks the modern/right way. Bricks don't support things; they are a way of regulating the temperature in a home, and they are amazingly effective if they have the right specific heat capacity, and you have enough of them. Laying 30-tons of bricks inside the insulation of a modern home along with big overhangs and good double-glazing allows very efficient energy use, and no cooling required.
My guess it speed and compositional challenges. I totally agree that tunneling systems should put the materials to use somehow.
My guess is more PR from Electric Jesus.
It's ancient innovation lol. Most modern drilling machine has facility who can mix dirt, sand, and water to cement the tunnel right after they dug it. Nothing new really
This is what I've been wondering about from the start. How often the material from a tunnel would be suitable for bricks and how they might sort material and discard the rubbish rocks and such? My dad worked in tunnel construction when I was a kid and I've seen a muck pile or two. Its wide range of soils and rock, silicates and such usually even on just one major project. An awful lot of what comes out of the ground isn't suitable for brick making.
was it necessary to mention that you were a kid when your dad worked??
@@mersenne2486 Maybe not? My dad had several jobs but his longest was working as a construction inspector for Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation. As such he worked on many different types of water projects such as dam's, canal systems, and indeed tunnels. When I was very young I got to visit the water system tunnel he was working on at that time. It made quite an impression on me with the immense size of the entire project and the equipment used and such. Quite an impressive take your kid to work day. lol
But what was the point of your question.....??
@@gibu002 i just needed to know more, so i did. 😉
I don't think that they abandoned the project. I just think it's something for a later date once the more pressing matters of tunneling speed, automating wall building, material extraction etc are handled and I also think the viability(targeted price point/value) rises the more projects they have and the larger these are. It's probably a waste of time for them to focus on that right now and its a better idea to get their operations streamlined and by the time they have done that and start operating on a large scale, previous iterations of the bricks production may become obsolete so they might as well think about it at the end.
Now THIS my friend, is real journalism
It's just clickbait the boring company still doesn't have enough work to produce a steady supply of bricks since the boring company is a tunneling company.
@@XLostGamer Not clickbait. Did you read the description?
Uhm? So then what Happened To The Boring Company Bricks? This video (real journalism aside) did not provide any answers.
A real journalist would have taken 10 minutes to call them, and ask them.... instead he seemingly spent hours searching the web, and has nothing but speculation to show for it.
@@Stevenpwalsh day to day its usually good starter information
What's inside didnt waste $400, he prob gained thousands from that video. But great vid overall, nice job!
The Boring Project's leftover bricks is worth more the Nikola
Facts
The bricks that your mouse pointer are on at 3:15 do look like a larger version of the bricks to me, but the ones on the far side don't. Hmmm
Reuse of excavated material is a wonderful idea but difficult to implement. It’s more likely to be used as general fill instead of bricks which require a strict recipe.
Exactly!
Did you consider just e-mailing and/or calling the Boring Company to ask them what the current state on their brick production is and future brick production plans are?
While I was aware of these bricks I had never given them a second thought. Now because of this video I will be lying awake all night wondering whatever became of them. Thanks OBF.
Can you make a video on the boring machine? It fascinates me how they dig tunnels so much 'faster' and cheaper.
They dont
@@Boleslav69 Under budget and on time. That is faster and cheaper.
@@davidbeppler3032 Without emergency exits or escape tunnel, no fire suppression system and so narrow that you can barely walk past a standard size car in the tunnel, that makes it cheaper. If you're referring to the "Vegas loop" about being on time, it's still not built as promised. There should be autonomous 12 pax "cars", there isn't and the speed and pax/h capacity is nowhere near what Musk said before.
It's nothing special about the machine, it's a standard TBM the same as many others use.
@@skunkjobb lmao Ever heard of Thundarfeet? You sound just like him.
Awesome content man, keep it up!
Thank you! And I've seen your videos, you're doing great work as well! Waiting for your next upload ;)
I think it's worth keeping in mind WHY Boring Co was planning on producing bricks. . . to eliminate the cost of disposing of the spoils. That means if the cost of traditional disposal is low enough, or demand for bricks is not adequate, it may make economic sense to skip the brick making process and save on the labor and capital costs. I assume landfill space is not exactly at a premium in Las Vegas. For a project in California however, that calculus might be different!
Landfill? it is land but whatever.... like another big pile of rock in a desert is going to make much of a difference.
There is a constant (and huge) demand for fill on construction sites. The last project I was associated with made more money selling the fill than from the project itself.
I doubt that those $200 bricks were made from the spoil removed from the Las Vegas tunnel dig. Highly doubtful.
Thnx for all the research and report back
There could also be regulatory requirements for the bricks. testing and such for a new building material. and because the dirt that they are using for the bricks is not consistent then there could be regulatory problems with using them for construction.
Bricks have to meet ASTM C62-17. There's not a chance in hell that anysignificant amount of the dirt he's digging out of those tunnels is going to meet that specification.
@@joecummings1260 I am by no means an expert in the field of brick making. Would these bricks have different standards from a concrete additive? This might be a stupid question but I really would like to understand more about how these bricks would and could be classified.
@@jordanwanberg753 they actually would be considered "compressed Earth blocks" and are typically of lower strength then actual bricks. Still only certain types of soil can be used to manufacture them, and yes Portland cement can be added into the mix to increase strength, but it also significantly increases cost.
This Wikipedia page gives a brief overview about them.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_earth_block
It's possible this bricks are being treated as a side project and when conditions are right they'll be all over the thing.
I figured the same thing. Any material you dig out can be used for something but materials to make bricks is not found everywhere. They should have been more careful on this expo.
Excellent video, I appreciate your work and competent fact checking! You should keep a list of updates and thoughts and do an update someday to this "unsolved mystery".
The point is that , people with power sould be more conservative on what they say and promise .
Great Video - I came here looking for the same answer.
I'm guessing the answer is down to ground conditions as you've alluded to.
Example - In London, the ground contains virtually no rock, it's almost entirely clay so perfect for making bricks. However in the next big city of Manchester the ground is solid sandstone. An ideal candidate for skyscrapers and tunnels.
My guess is that they will approach each tunnel case by case basis, where clay and dirt exists they will make bricks; where solid rock exists, they will maybe grind it up and use it as an aggregate for the concrete ring segments.
If they are tunneling through limestone, they could produce the cement and aggregates from the bored limestone and then sell the excess material onto the market
You should have more viewers
That guy is Daniel from the youtube channel "What's Inside Family."
This was the HAI brick video that could have been, thank god we got something completely different instead
Why didnt you email or call someone from the boring company
The whole brick idea is obviously one of optimism with regards to upcycling waste from someone who isn't familiar with the existing problem. First being, the waste material from the boring tunnels the world over are going to be all sorts of different types of soil. Gravel, Sand, Silt, and Clay. You can't make bricks out of material you haven't tested rigorously. You can't make bricks out of material that isn't consistent. You can't make "bricks" out of anything besides clay. You can make masonry block out of anything, but you are going to need cement. Cement as we know is a very carbon heavy process. You are actually putting way more carbon in the air then you would putting the waste in a truck and sending it to a landfill.
As the boring company disturbs soil the world over it won't be getting Las Vegas sand everywhere. They will eventually hit plenty of things that they can't make bricks out of. Plenty of new brick designs will need to be taken representing the new soil.
What you *could* do is a "Soil Cement Amendment" and sort of 3D print the tube as you go. You would still need to toss what you can't use, but you would be driving through a tube like the middle of a cinderblock. That would be a win-win. You would need to separate the materials anyway. You get a mix design or several and use the appropriate one. Meanwhile you have separated the soils into "cleaner" materials and when you have enough to sell in bulk you sell that as a material instead.
Making pavers out of the waste makes the most sense as you wouldn't need to engineer it. Just call them Tesla Engineered Patios and watch Home Depot and watch Home Depot fall over themselves paying 10x the price of any other paver.
they have tested the made bricks for compression by forcing them into a hydraulic press when forming probably with a geotextile strengthening. Any bricks that has failed is weeded out. This will give a defined compressive strength that all bricks meet. 3d printing tunnels would be a nightmare the needed viscosity would wreck the compressive strength but your right it is doable but not much different from a sprayed system available. Your argument for pavers falls apart from your beginning statements that it would be hard to make consistent mixes required for a consumer goods.
For me the issue is durablitity of a dry mix and like you mention carbon impact of cement for a wet mix. i always liked the idea of rammed earth and ground anchors but that has its own problems
maybe they're waiting to get rights to "the bricks company"
What happened to the Chicago airport project?
they should try mixing some straw into the bricks. This will make them more like adobe bricks, add 20-30% volume and add a carbon sequestration component to the bricks. As long as those adobe bricks are standing, the carbon in that straw is removed from the atmospheric carbon cycle.
Interesting, thank you.
I subscribed because it's free and I can always change my mind
As with all other Elon projects over the last two decades, it makes more sense in the context of building a colony on Mars.
Despite its mythical Earth based creation legend, the boring companies long term goal is making tunnels on Mars.
Glass domed cities are great for science fiction art, but they aren't very effective at protecting humans from cosmic rays. Humans will want to spend most of their time under many meters of rock. Mars has huge lava tubes, but there will need to be many tunnels to connect them to each other and to infrastructure on the surface.
You don't want cities in the same lava tube as industrial scale LOX and liquified methane production plants. The city should be separated from the explodey stuff by serpentine tunnels with blast doors, and pressure relief ports.
A city needs a great deal of infrastructure at the surface. Bricks are great for building that infrastructure. There will need to be large solar farms for energy production, and large radiator arrays to get rid of waste heat.
The majority of tunneling will be in mining operations.
I suspect that there will be a huge increase in brick research after the first Martian samples return to Earth.
Also, building housing for people on Earth is a great justification for learning how to turn tunneling waste into construction material on a large scale.
SpaceX's long term goal is not making tunnels on Mars. It is making us a multiplanetary species. You are jumping to a conclusion if you think bricks are needed.
One mistake there is no such thing as waste only underutilized resources that heat can be put to many uses one of them being electricity production.
@@jbbuzzable SpaceX to get them there Boring Company to set up shop, got to have the place to live as an interplanetary species Johnny the bricks are just turning a waste into a product we can always find plenty of things to do with bricks latter.
Good job, good job, nice investigation, my friend
I mean, it’s okay to tackle one problem at a time, especially for a startup. Step 1) learn how to dig tunnels cheaply, step 2) make cheap bricks out of the tunneling byproduct, step 3) profit
The problem there is that half the tunneling cost goes to soil removal. Brick idea is there for reduced costs by reselling the material. Unless soil is perfect for brick making this was never going to happen. Just the usual Elon scammy overpromising while severly underdelivering.
What about the sides of the tunnel. Is that made out of the same material as the bricks?
No, those are concrete panels, just like many other bored tunnels use. There is absolutely nothing innovative about The Boring Company.
In other words you can't make dirt bricks out of rock. 😂
You can make bricks out of most anything. The challenge is to produce a consistent quality product at a reasonable price.
From your research are there any announced upcoming projects of the Boring company where me might see their 2.0 Bricks. Also what’s the name of the song you used from 2:22-3:16? Thanks for the informative video, the mystery continues, maybe Elon lost interest in Boring Bricks.
i doubt the limestone under Austin will be very good raw material. Maybe for the D.C. -- Baltimore tunnel?
I don't think we have any projects that are announced (that I know of at least) where the soil would be optimal for bricks. Although I could be wrong. And the song is named "In the gloom" by Michael Rothery. It's on Epidemic Sounds (where all my music is from).
@@mcRydes - limestone is even better, though, as it is used for cement - which in turn is used in both concrete and mortar. It should be a much better revenue stream that bricks.
Have I just been bRick rolled?
interesting facts. speculations? not so much - we all can do our own speculations.
Great video! I was wondering what happened do the bricks thing.. Can you make a video on how to make these types of videos?
Am I the only one who has the screen turn to white or black multiple times between the video?
he's selling the bricks "underground"🤣
Did you try calling the Boring Company and asking them?
My one point i want to get clear
What material they have used to make the brick?
You said like clay ,sand,dirt
Even Elon said they are using dirt.
What dirt they are using?
They built that tower at SpaceX out of the bricks. I think they tore it down sometime in 2020. I don’t know the reason why.??
$200 a brick??? I thought they were supposed to be cheap
IRC nature makes clay as nitric acid from lighting and air dissolve rocks this could be sped up with higher acid levels in batch tanks with all that crushed rock/muck but I don't think Elon is going to do that.
Great video, but please get rid of the white screens in your videos they are blinding to see at night please use longer videos or black screen for your cuts ;)
@Half As Interesting (can't figure out how to tag someone who hasn't commented)
Well that's a fine brick video
I'm dumbfounded by the fact that the whole channel audience missed what they craved so long - a whole video about bricks!
They should all watch it and send it to HAI comments just for the lulz
The musk boring machines are to small for anything in the long term. The only thing I can think of is for underground hyperloop or to fit in a rocket to tunnel on the moon and Mars. Instead of making bricks they should rise ground level around the world when tunnel boring.
Excellent video my friend
I wonder if the blocks you identified as commercial blocks were actually boring company blocks made with different machinery that’s my guess Elon never said they were only going to make one kind of brick there are hundreds of possible variations
Why would anyone take anything Elon Musk says seriously?
they are bricks right and they can change shape. No one said it have to be those small bricks
Depending upon the composition of the clay, firing bricks generates significant noxious flue gases which are difficult to capture. There are numerous white papers and other publications regarding this challenge on the web. Most of the Victorian and Georgian houses in the UK were built using clay excavated and fired on site, but this type of activity is now banned in cities. We are doing cutting edge innovation in this area, so do please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on eco friendly brick or clay 3D printing...
Boring Company Bricks, it seems, are strictly made by very high compression, and not by Firing them, like in Brickyard of old!
@@robertweekley5926 i wouldn't be surprised if there is also some cement added to the mix. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't
@@mcRydes Compressed bricks do have a cement element, but a few of the larger cement companies are bringing out reduced CO2 products.
What is with all the extremely annoying bright white screens?
Good info, but ditch the white outs.
@OBF im a huge fan. I want to buy a Boring Brick but I cant seem to find them anywhere. If you could help me with this I would greatly appreciate it.
Austin Clay!!!!
Nice
Why not make the bricks and use them to line the tunnel walls? There are plenty of 19th century brick-lined tunnels in the UK that are still standing.
Because the material they are excavating isn't suitable for making bricks, and bricks are a very expensive way to line tunnel walls.
It s like when you mine in minecraft and you get all of thosr stones, hahah
The great brick mystery. Maybe they are dumping them in the ocean like they do with the Model 3s 😜.
You are asking some great questions. Stay curious and keep making these videos!
What in the heck are you even talking about?
@@jbbuzzable about 2-3 years ago the $TSLAQ short sellers said there was no demand so therefore Tesla must have been dumping cars into the ocean.
@@JustinAnnes Okay. I missed your sarcasm.
"They're waiting for the right opportunity to make them"
Hey, we hear Austin Chalk is great for digging in! 😉
Ur doing gpod continue
Hi there Oliver! Your videos are great. But what's the idea with the white screen? Just a suggestion, get rid of it. All the rest is very nice! Congrats!
Thank you! And regarding the white screens. I've found that my audience retention is much higher when I have the screen go white once I either need to make an important point or when changing to a different subject. So it is completely intentional.
I'm pretty sure if you ask Elon Musk about his boring bricks he'll look at you confused and ask "What are you talking about?"
I'm sure the Acme Brick cartel is involved. :)
Most of the cost of the bricks comes from heat. The cost of the dirt is small
WHERE R THE BRICKS EEELON
Elon is our IRL Tony Stark
Nah hes a scammer
@OBF I hope you got permission from @HAI to make this video
I'm slightly confused
You missed the real 'bricks' and focused on the blocks forming a containment cell. Look higher up in the picture for big curved bricks. Yes, tunnel segments.
Are you claiming the tunnel segments were made from the excavated materials?
Not claiming, suggesting.
@@tienszietsman5985
Doubt it as they're concrete.
They need to use certain materials for strength, and you need them as your tunneling.
I make compression bricks and I can confirm that the material used is extremely important. It has to have the perfect amount of sand, dirt and clay. Too much clay and they eventually crack. Too much sand and they crumble before drying. It's a very scientific process.
@@interlockbricks5354 sheesh, 30% clay is a lot. Do they crack at all?
Vaporware
Cement, las Vegas soil and voila;brickc ! Must better inform yourself
He used that brick to make house
Great video, but where do you get the idea that the $.10 brick cost $200?
Well, he said that in the video. He bought it off eBay from one of the engineers that worked on the project. Apparently Elon wasn't pleased with how they looked so he just gave the bricks to those who worked on the project.
Just ask Elon directly why do so many ridicules guessing.
I doubt the richest man on the planet will have spare time for a possibly abandoned project :)
maybe have english subtitles so people like who are hearing impaired can also be part of the conversation :(
Next time, take a look at Elon's claim of boring tunnels ten times cheaper or faster. He's just using off-the-shelf technology. The answer could be that he's only boring tiny and utterly useless tunnels which can easily turn into death-traps for many people when it all goes wrong.
In my view, you can only compare tunnel boring costs by diameter.
Don't put your money into any idea of musks that involves a tube of ANY kind, a tunnel of ANY kind, or an electric plane of ANY kind.
He's been OK, at replicating and commercializing NASA technology from back in 1995 with the DC-X tail-landing booster, and he seems to have a fairly-reliable LEO rocket system in Falcon 9, which might be slightly cheaper than disposable rockets -- only time will tell. It's a totally traditional rocket, and we know those tend to work.
Starship is a fantastic idea, in theory, but they are never going to turn around like he says they will. More to the point, how do you trust a bunch of Raptor engines which have vacuum-welded and cold-soaked themselves for months on end, in space? Turbo pumps are crappy things, and that is why no rockets with them have ever been used by NASA in space. Just pressure the tanks and open the valves, and off you go. Simple. Safe. Reliable.
It is my fervent wish he makes Starship a raging success, and puts millions of tons of stuff on orbit, and sends thousands of tons of people and stuff to Mars. But I'll quote Elon here; "Reusable orbital rockets are hard.
Even at 50 cents a brick they would sell like hot cakes! The bricks shown in the video are more like cinder blocks rather than bricks. Those things go for $0.90-1.70 each unless you buy in massive quantities.
I wanted to share a concept for continuous tunneling. I'm trying to describe my thoughts on a novel process of "continuous helical tunnel boring" I think this kind of concept could speed the construction of a 3dimensional tunnel system that Elon Musk described exponentially. If there is anyone you could think of to share this idea with I would appreciate that.
.
Working from the premises that it is better to continuously "pour" the structural concrete tunnel walls rather than pausing the tunneling process to lay precast sections of wall.
The area of operations we are then focusing on is the area directly behind the boring machine face and within the tunnel shield wall where we will have to transport materials for forming our tunnel wall from without the tunnel dig to the area of operations.
These materials being a role of sandwiched basalt fiber fabric pre impregnated with high strength Portland cement, configured into a sleeve that when injected with wet concrete will create a continuous form laid in a spiral or helical manor along the tunnel wall and forming a negative worm gear. These roles can be transported to the area of operations by autonomous electric vehicle conveyance. The roles being of a fixed length must be connected end to end by a process of stitching by which the two ends are laid open and sown together as the material is being fed to the work surface. To do this without interrupting the whole process slack has to be fed towards the wall end in an inch worm fashion and then taken up again until the next seam is necessary. These rolls of basalt fiber fabric have a structural cross threading in a manner in which when filled with concrete they form a roughly T shaped extrusion creating both a structural concrete form and the inner teeth of the negative worm gear. These pre impregnated basalt fabric roles which both give structural form and act as structural forms for the wet concrete mix are key to continuously forming the walls of the tunnel.
Two other main elements in this process are water and wet concrete mix both separately conveyed to the area of operations through high pressure hoses. It's important to note that ideally a concrete batching plant be located at the entrance to the tunnel and raw materials stockpiled so as to avoid delays in pouring that come from concrete mixing trucks being ironically stuck in traffic that the boring company is attempting to alleviate. Also that ideally spoil material from the tunnel would be mixed with this concrete and reconstituted as the walls of the tunnel. Raw water is needed to activate the impregnated basalt fabric and applying it is a tricky problem. I'm going to try to use an analogy to describe this process and the process of injecting the wet concrete into the fabric sleeve. We should all by now as I write this in the beginning of 2021 be familiar with the image of an intubation tube being inserted down the esophagus of a patient. In this case the intubation tube is the nozzle end of the concrete hose which is inserted in the fabric sleeve which is the esophagus of our patient. The nozzle is a two pant system with an inner hose reaching farther into the sleeve and an outer jacket even applies water to the inside of the fabric sleeve.
Directionality of this tunnel wall system is achieved by the flexible nature of the fabric sleeved poured concrete rather than the traditional precast concrete block systems used today.
The means of conveyance of the tunnel boring machine is achieved by an articulated tunnel shield which locks into the worm gear of the tunnel, screwing itself among with a multitude of industrial inhud electric drive wheels. Theses drive wheels are relatively low speed compared to electric car motors but harness the high torque and flexible geometry of electric drive systems.
Working on this idea. The current limiting factor to tunnel construction is the placing of precast concrete tunnel segments. The above concept is an attempt to break from that system.
Thanks for your time, keep up the good work.
Nice video on a subject that is a bit boring. I think it's a bad idea. It's cheaper to go to places where they have the right materials for bricks and quarry it. You could be able to use the material from boring through hard rock as part of the process to make paver style bricks, but that might be all that good of an idea either. I think that material is most often used for aggregate that is used in the tunnel which seems like a much better idea to me.
I think it depends. If they are boring through granite for example, I would not assume that it's cheaper to throw it away and mine elsewhere
Normally, bricks contain the following ingredients:[21]
Silica (sand) - 50% to 60% by weight
Alumina (clay) - 20% to 30% by weight
Lime - 2 to 5% by weight
Iron oxide - ≤ 7% by weight
Magnesia - less than 1% by weight
different places have different soil that are less or more suited for making bricks.
you can skip the blueballs annoying dangling the video does.
That is why they just moved to Austin, TX. Rocky soil.
No.
Get rid of the beat machine, very difficult to focus on what you are saying
Elon Musk is good at selling pipe dreams
Elon will definitely continue with bricks. His Main goal is making our planet sustainablr and current building materials are some of the worlds worst polluters. Meanwhile these bricks are effectively carbon neutral and could also be used to sequestrate carbon.
Someone who wants to make the planet more sustainable wouldn't advertise for bitcoin. A currency which waste 120 terawatt hours. Every year. Through his Twitter messages the currency climbed 20. %. The additional co2 this will cause is more than all his cars will ever save.
The bricks are more of Elon's BS. It cannot be cost effective making two bricks at a time. Ever seen a real brick manufacturer.
Pay $400 for two 10c bricks. hmmm.
It makes some sort of American/UA-cam sense I guess.
Here is a fact: you can't make a brick for under 10-cents. Sorry. Not possible.
It would be easy to sell bricks at 10-cents each if they were certified as load-bearing. But bricks today aren't for building - that is dumb stuff. Bricks go on the INSIDE of a building, and INSIDE the insulation, not the outside!
As a building material bricks are poor. If your house is brick, it's a danger to you. Period.
But, if you have bricks inside tied to the structure, as thermal mass, then you're using bricks the modern/right way. Bricks don't support things; they are a way of regulating the temperature in a home, and they are amazingly effective if they have the right specific heat capacity, and you have enough of them.
Laying 30-tons of bricks inside the insulation of a modern home along with big overhangs and good double-glazing allows very efficient energy use, and no cooling required.
Video is great but it's obvious to me that you don't work in construction bisness.
Fourth