Saturday, April 16, 2011

Paving The Yellow Brick Road...

Paved paths, roads and driveways look great, but the actual laying of the bricks is back-breaking, time-consuming work... or at least, it is if you do it the usual way.
A Dutch industrial company Vanku decided that squatting, kneeling and shoving the bricks into place on the ground was just too slow and hard, so it invented the Tiger Stone paving machine.
This 4m, 5m or 6m-wide device is fed loose bricks, and lays them out onto the road as it slowly moves along. A quick going-over with a tamper, and voila! Instant brick road, Toto!
A couple of human operators stand on a platform on top, feeding loose bricks by hand from its hopper into its sloping “pusher” slot – that's about the only human touch the bricks get, as the operators arrange the bricks into the desired finished pattern. Then gravity slides them together, in one road-wide sheet, down onto the sand bed.
A machine with two operators can pave at least 300sq.m. per day, whereas a single human paver on hands and knees manages about 75sq.m. So obviously a substantial saving in time, but the cost? The Tiger Stone is priced from US$82k-110k.
I'm curious: how does it pave around corners?

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