Boring Company Tour Part 1 ... Innovation, First-Principles, TBM Production & Progress!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 พ.ค. 2024
- This is part 1 of a two-part series that summarizes my recent tour of the Boring Company's Bastrop, Texas facility.
I would like to thank the Boring Company, especially Nick, David and Lisa for setting up this tour and for showing me around a fascinating location! Also, to the many employees I got to meet and talk with, thank you for making the day so special!
In this video, we look around the Bastrop, Texas site and explore many of the facilities, functions and developments that are on-going here.
Did you know the Boring Company spun off from SpaceX and shares the same first-principles methodology of looking at challenges and developing solutions and the iterative design approach that SpaceX has made famous with the development of the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon Capsule and now the Starship system? These concepts drive the Boring Company and its employees forward as they try to solve traffic congestion, plan for high-speed "hyperloop" travel and in the longer-term, off-world tunneling operations!
At this site, we see the only production factory for Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMS) in the USA, and we are able to talk about some of the innovations they are pursuing to improve the overall efficiency and speed of tunneling, advancing the state of the art in this field where not much has truly changed on over 100 years!
In Part 1, we concentrate on the developments at this site, but in Part 2, we will further the discussion by looking at the tunneling operations at Giga Texas and discuss two fundamental objectives the Boring Company has in the iterative design process and the overarching goal of the company to meet their near-, mid-, and long-term missions. - ยานยนต์และพาหนะ
Joe, I think they need to hire you for a PR media role. You really help me know what's going on with all these companies!
THANKS SO MUCH,NICK,DAVID, LISA 🤗 FOR LETTING JOE DO THIS TOUR, AND SHARING IT WITH US,🤗 HOPING YOU CONTINUE TO MAKE GREAT PROGRESS 👍💚💚💚
I remember David and Lisa from way back in 1962. Nice to know they're doing better now.
🙋♂️THANKS JOE ,READY TO BE BORED 🥱😬💚💚💚
Thanks Joe for sharing the Boring Company Tour Part 1.
Thank you , a well spent half hour.
Amazing stuff... from the staff and engineers and Boring Co. to Joe and his explanation of what things are and how they work. Thank you all.
Sorry Joe, one correction. 8:50 - Segments are 5 feet long not 3 feet. (it says on the drawings also at 9:40). They are 61" on the wide side and 59" on the narrow side, average 60". Also the segments are cast with a groove for a bar locator on the radial edge, which could delete the need for bolted joints in a ring of this diameter. Not sure why they are not using it. And they don't seem to have cast in the joint check identifier, which is shown on the drawing, but not detailed on the mould/casting.
They are doing their casting in the open air! No temperature or weather control, and the concrete batching plant seems pretty basic. Such a method would never get approval on a major tunnelling project pretty much anywhere in the world. Things like this are what leads me to say that they are decades behind the curve in tunnelling technology I'm sorry to say.
Thanks for the insight, it confirmed a lot for me.
Thx
SpaceX was building rockets out in the salty dusty air for years while they were iterating through prototypes. Now that they are much further along they have built a dedicated factory building, and the standards under which the rockets are built have drastically improved. The boring company is very much in a testing and design phase, so things like prepping tunnel segments for scale production likely aren’t a focus
Or, look at it another way, The Boring Company has found ways that these controlled environments are not really required for their manufactring process, saving millions in the production process.. Like they also do not need clean rooms to manufacture a Starship rocket.. Basic airconditioning and dust control is sufficient. Pretty arrogant to conclude The Boring company is decades behind.
Elon Musk companies have the habit to question the "established and accepted" methods of manufacturing and the products themselves, to itterate to something completely new and in the end much better. Most of the time it is the very reason Elon Musk starts new companies, as he sees ways to improve or radically change the incumbants way of doing things. Like Tesla is now years ahead with EV manufacturing and with EV's themselves, and the "established" legacy companies, who first laughed at them, now panicing and try to copy Tesla.... YOU are at the laughing stage, so to speak, beware not to be overtaken by the Boring company in a few years finding The Boring Company scooping up contracts left and right and your company starts falling behind...
Just look at what Elon Musk did with all the companies he worked on.
Zip.com Disrupted the yellow pages telephone book (They laughed Elon and Kimbal out of the door when they presented his idea)
Paypal.com Made international money transfer as easy and fast as sending an email (Banks did not want to invest in that.. now worth tens of Billions)
SpaceX first and only orbital rocket company able to return 10 story tall booster rockets back to earth and re-use them, now sending payloads into orbit at 10% of the costs of the incumbants.. NOBODY believed that returning oribital rocket boosters from space back to earth and use them tens of times again and again, was at all possible
Tesla proofed to the world Electric cars can be compelling and a viable option for personal transportation, and now also for cargo.. Legacy car makers laughed at Tesla for about a decade, untill Tesla became the only one making Electric cars at a profit and spitting them out every 30 seconds at very low cost.
Tesla was laughed at when they presented the Humanoid Robot plans 2-3 years ago.. Now there are tens of companies trying to do the same.
Do you see the pattern here? I don't know what company you work for, but I would take notice of the Boring company and take them very serious. They have just started 6 years ago and already boring tunnels in several places succesfully.. relatively quickly and at a profit
Liner Types A and B could be for straight tunneling respectively curved tunneling. I had expected the first part of the tunneling machine (with the cutter head attached) to be a lot shorter than it actually looked in order to push it into reasonably tight turns using the rams. The ability to make tight turns (in tunneling) was also one of the announced abilities of the TBC technology. Maybe we should be able to spot both A and B type of liners in the laydown area but I haven't spotted any. Also the (first?) tunnel at GT may be a straight-in-line exercise.
They are using the type B. It is a universal ring that can "steer" or follow the TBM around curves just by orienting the ring in a certain way. See the drawing 9 minutes in, it shows the ring is 61" at the top and 59" at the bottom (60" nominal) they can build it in any one of 16 positions (No. of dowels). That way it can turn a theoretical curve radius of 412' or 135m in any direction. However, allowing for steering and correction this should be limited to around 175-200m.
I think Type A could be the abandoned hexagonal segment moulds (these only really work on long straight rock tunnels as the cant really go round corners, so their use is limited, tunnel engineers know this, so I have no idea why they experimented with them for this type of TBM).
Thank you Joe! Your videos are always so informative! 👍
Well I enjoyed that! a most entertaining tour! I can't wait for part 2! (I think I arrived too early for this to show, as when I clicked on the link it only played 51 seconds of video which I thought was a bit short! 😄
That was a trailer you watched. This is the full video
@@JoeTegtmeyer Saw quite a few similar comments on the trailers. Simple writing skills, but no reading comprehension. These must be my students commenting on your videos, so I apologize on their behalf…
@@briansmith1371 oh, this made me laugh. Students, same all over the world.
Full of information on the process and goals,
Thank you.
Will be used for FSD training.
Great work as always Joe. Fast, neat, average…
Been waiting for this video since the announcement.
Nice video Joe. High quality work as usual. However I have to be honest slightly disappointed that we didn’t get much new information. Maybe the boring company didn’t want to give much away or maybe there is not much more to say? Would like to know more about progress in meeting their goals, new technology they are developing, some details on new projects, more hints on what’s planned at Tesla giga Texas, what are the currently achieved tunneling speeds , etc.
They will only do enough token work to keep investors pouring money in. This will never be a viable mass transit solution. It is just another Elon fever dream😂
Current tunnelling speed at Giga Texas is no more than about 10m per day. Average is about 6 so far, it should increase as the full setup was installed in the last 2 weeks.
Well done!
Very interesting!😀
Cool. Enjoyed that.
Thanks Joe and thanks to The Boring Company. I wish you could have shown more of the internal engineering. Maybe Elon will let them provide you with scrubbed video clips for your next tour video. I missed the small print on the building "M&M TS" (Moon and Mars Transport System:-).
Any news on the material science of regolith?
OOPs wrote this before watching the video, the hyperloop is being developed yay, not heard anything about it over the past few years. Good stuff, boring company. Leaving my comment as a comment that i suspect the majority feel is the situation right now, obviously this video shows there are developments. Nice small tunnel much faster and cheaper to build i suspect, would love to hear much more about it.
If you look at the islands off the coast of Scotland and how they have created massive tunnels by blasting through the rock and dirt in a very short period of time, then shooting concrete onto the walls with rebar placed there, it is much faster and more economical than using a boring machine and precast panels.
The Boring Company was initially started to create a semi vacuum tunnel that could reach different sides of the country, then using a vacuum have "trains" travel in this vacuum at limited friction. There was talk of creating pods that could travel at 700 mph. This really would have ended up changing tunnelling for transport completely. But now we have The Boring Company making tunnels just big enough for one car to travel down, and not on rails either but driving slowly.
While i like tunnelling Tesla or The Boring Company have not changed much, it is still a very slow process and not as innovative as we all thought it would be. and where are the metal above ground tunnels? I am saddened that the whole idea was converted to something others have perfected.
I so wish i could have travelled in a pod with a dozen others, with the walls make from screens showing different scenes to make it less claustrophobic. There were so many opportunities lost, i and others imagined looking out at the countryside or underwater vistas or even as though we were driving through an alien vista, being distracted from the fact we were in a sealed tunnel a few meters wide. Deep underground or overground.
The boring company and hyperloop have nothing to do with each other
One was a tweet idea and this is a tunnelling machine company for many projects
They have done student hyperloop projects for students to get engineering and team building skills
Tunneling through granite isn't the same as tunneling through soil. You can't blast your way through soil and other loose formations.
Nice vidio Joe, Thanks for the info.
Merci👍👍👍
Thanks for the great and informative video. Do you know how many separate tunnel projects are currently underway?
Awesome Joe!
Thanks!
We need a laser boring machine like in the movie The Core to make underground long distance high speed rail a reality
Yes! That’s the answer. Why haven’t the thousands of Engineers in this industry thought of that?
It was staring us all in the face.
I can only see one tiny problem…………
Seems like the rocket scientists are doing much more impressive stuff above ground than below ground. A mile a month ? Do they have speed goals?
Can’t wait
Same, if they can do a hyperloop that can tunnel at 1mile a day then it could become a very impressive business, I am sure there will be many changes to the boring machine and the tunnel. What about lining it with SpaceX stainless steel instead of concrete, that could make progress faster, and you could have a roll of steel on the machine in the tunnel able to bend the steel for joints and unravel it as the tunnel progresses. Don't know much about tunnels, but enough to comment, but this seems like it would be more expensive but so much faster to implement.
@@palmtreeshenanigans It needs the concrete segments to push off for the forward thrust.
FML... I just spent 30 mins watching a boring tour. :)
The way Tesla has built and torn out different parts of Giga Texas I wonder if just digging a path along the way. Line the walls and make it square then cover with a roof. With the freeway just take out one lane, put in the tunnel and repave the freeway. At Giga Texas they are putting in conduit all over and storm drainage so it makes me wonder what the cost difference would be.
What is their current backlog?
Seems like feet per hour is a better way to state the speed.
It's interesting how secretive they seem to be with this tech, at least compared to batteries, vehicles, robots, rockets, etc. No video inside the factories or tunnels, and very little detail about how their TBM system actually works. It would be cool to see a TBM animation that shows the details of dirt transport, conveyor buildout, tunnel segment transport and assembly, power management, navigation, etc. The logistics of all that still seems like a mystery.
Watch any TH-cam video on EPB TBM tunnelling. That is what they are doing. No evidence of anything new or innovative
@@davidsalisbury50 based on their goal of tunneling 10x faster and 10x cheaper, I assumed they were also doing something new or innovative.
@@paulrybarczyk5013 they made a big thing of the porpoising launch idea, but of course this only works in some locations, most sites/alignments have constraints that won’t allow this.
Also, a site launch shaft can be constructed in advance of the TBM arrival. There is some potential cost saving but it is rarely that simple in any urban environment.
They said they were 3x more powerful (I think their website still says this). TBM’s come in all power configurations, to suit the ground conditions. Almost all TBMs have spare power if needed (just like your car), nobody drives at full power all the time. The installed power (head rotation and thrust combination) is limited by the size/strength of the main bearing. A TBM of this size has limited space for the main bearing, a limit on forward thrust, so a limit on the power that can be usefully applied.
They have built a very ordinary EPB TBM and tried to give the impression it is something new.
Everything they have experimented with has been done before by others, who have done a lot more besides.
Their shtick is one size, one design to save cost. But CRCHI can pump out an EPB TBM twice a week for a standard metro 6m diameter tunnel from their main manufacturing base. They have built hundreds of them in the past couple of decades for cities across China and the rest of the world.
Enough detail seen from the assembly at Giga Texas to confirm all the impressions I had from their work in Vegas and Bastrop.
if anyone makes extraordinary claims (10x cheaper and 10x faster). Hey should be asked to provide the extraordinary evidence to support their claim.
Hence they say it is an aim!
My aim is to loose 20kg and run a marathon in an hour and 20 minutes. Theoretically possible, humans can run 100m in 10 seconds right!
And that’s only twice as fast as current records, or 3 faster than the average marathon runner.
Anyone can see how ridiculous that AIM is. Unfortunately tunnelling is a complex business that most people don’t really understand. Perfect opportunity for some snake oil sales and Hyperbole.
@@davidsalisbury50 Ridiculous hyperbole? Snake oil? You apparently dislike TBC because their goals are too ambitious. Reusable rockets were too ambitious until Elon made SpaceX best in class. Maybe Elon will also do that for tunneling. Who knows? His Vegas tunnel project seems to be going well.
Did they mention the current number of people employed at Bastrop?
Fascinating. I am curious how the rings connect to each other. I see the alignment dowels, but is there nothing like the bolts that tie segments together? The thing has rubber seals that are bound to compress when a vacuum is pulled. Wount the structure move from that with not tie bolts? Vacuum seals are a bitch, how do they seal such a large structure, deal with cracks, subsidance, the sprout threads, etc. Where do they use the grout we see at Giga?
The grout is injected into the anulus left by the TBM as it slides forward over the segments. It provides stability to the ring and avoids ground settlement into the 50mm or so gap left by the TBM tail-shield. Google "through the tail grouting TBM", should be some videos to explain.
intresting... did they tell you were the giga texas tunnel would end is it inside or outside the building. if you can say
Boy. they sure named the company correctly. After the TBM tunnels underground watching from topside
is like watching grass grow or paint dry it is in fact VERY BORING until the TBM surfaces.
!
I think acceptance of hyperloop for public transportation will be slow.
Best case usage could be freight transportation. Transporting shipping containers would get traffic off of surface roads.
Did you ask them if the Tesla tunnel will terminate inside south extension or outside between highway berm and Tesla Road as I suspect?!
Boring Co should visit the Colorado School of Mining - they are world experts in tunnelling and test cutting, pressure and grinding systems for tunnel projects among other things.
I agree, CSM could work with them well, with TBC's capital investment and CSM's expertise they could move the industry forward in a far more effective way.
Is there any kind of a kit of boring tunnel segments that a person could play around with?
I have one. It was a one of a kind moulded plastic set made to demonstrate the features of the ring and the use of a universal type ring. A bit outdated now in terms of its design features . In a box somewhere. Much easier to do with software these days.
❤❤❤🎉
Gary is faster than Boring at the gigafactory! Gary could have gone back and forth. But would be smashed by freeway traffic.
👋👍
Should they go with a bridge or tunnel
What a bait and switch! Where is the video of the facility's interior?
I agree, although I am not surprised. TBC have been very secretive with their developments. Being the old cynic that I am, I put this more down to not much to see to justify the big VC investments, rather than something that will revolutionize the industry.
How high tech is the Boring Company’s tunneling machine compared with tunneling machine from other, perhaps older, companies?
In my view it is about 20 years behind. 5 years ago they were 30 years behind, so they are catching up. People may disagree with me, but I do have the benefit of facts and 40 years of experience to back up my view.
Robbins Corporation have been manufacturing TBM's in the US since 1965, although they may be doing the majority of their TBM manufacture offshore these days (China/India). So TBC may be correct that they are the only current manufacturer in the US.
@@tunnellingsalisbury7605so the Robbins Corporation TBM is technologically more advanced than the Boring Company’s means what exactly? Faster and cheaper to bore tunnels? Less manpower needed with more automated systems available? Easier to set up and deploy? Perhaps greater support facilities for auxilliary operations?
@@ismailnyeyusof3520 Not necessarily any of those things. They have built a large number of faster TBM's. But they have also built TBM's that are suited to many different types of ground conditions. Robbins have historically tended to focus on hard rock TBM's. The Niagra project and the current very long water transfer tunnel in India. See the Robbins TBM records table on their website.
As an analogy consider a new car manufacturer that has built one standard four door compact, and nothing else. Would you consider them a world leader when other car manufacturers have a range of cars from 2-door coupe's, SUV's, pickup's, vans, hatchbacks and estates. Plus a 60-year history of development.
They may be a player in one sector of the market, but are long way from being considered an industry leader.
Robbins have been through good times and bad over the years but they have survived and are still supplying very robust TBM's to the market.
The "freight" tunnel in the diagram around 7:00 looks like it could be a railcar by Intramoteve or Parallel Systems. Subway tunnels cost $50m/mile up to $1 billion per mile. Boring claims $5 million/mile. Even having to dig 3-6 tunnels (1-2 each direction, and 1 or 2 service tunnels) the cost is half of the cheapest current option. Boring should be working with railcar companies to develop narrower track & train rolling stock for the next Prufrock machine. Each subway takes thousands of cars off the road. Elon doesn't care about car sales anyway, right?
Oh. You're serious. Sorry, I misunderstood.
ok
This video was Boring! 😗😜
Obviously, the US does some things well, and some things incredibly poorly. Passenger railway is poorly done as it serves people, is a corporate run travel mode, not a personal mode and the people who enjoy a personal travel mode (car/small aircraft) don't want their taxpayer dollars spent on travel modes they don't personally use - like passenger rail. Millions of Americans even have lead water supply pipes leaching lead into their brains such are the issues with utility/transport networks. Around the world, large TBMs are mainly deployed on railway lines as railway needs a more squarish hole than roads. Roads need to be wide rather than high - TBMs thus way over dig for roads. Thus, TBMs not used or made in the US.
Boring Co is essentially designing TBMs of a size for use on the moon and mars. They are too small for bus and train public transport - thus are called utility scale boring machines in the rest of the world. There could be other makers of utility scale machines in the US, that we don't know about.
Like no doubt everybody has said before....Very Boring !
@Joe Bro, I'm getting bored with seeing and hearing you. It's not you we're here to see, That's why I stopped watching Jeff a LONG time ago. You trailed this Two days ago. You don't get to keep my attention that long. I'm not going to watch these, because I don't even want to hear your voice any more. There is not a lot happening these days at GT so I'll probably not bother watching. All good things must come to an end I suppose. Its worth remembering that most people don't say anything when they leave. So I'm not alone.
Appreciate the positive comment! Thank you for watching
@@JoeTegtmeyer You're welcome. I love you Joe and we have a LOT! of water under the bridge and my gratitude to you for that and your dedication is immense. It's partly me. I've been mood challenged, lets say, for much of my life in part due to multiple non-physical disabilities. One or more which I share with our good friend Elon, which is very much misunderstood. My ability to find joy is diminishing and my skin is currently very thin. So I hold my hand up to it being more my problem. Following Elon's genius antics has given me reason to live, for quite a number of years, which I immeasurably grateful. Because I see in him a bit of what I could have been. But, no one ever bought my 'crazy' plans. I still have a fleeting feeling that I can still make it, but I know that's just a comfort blanket now. Thanks again bro.