4 ms·

Boring Co. has designed their own TBM based on the one they purchased. Their breakthrough is in bringing down cost per mile and time required to tunnel. As for

Boring Co. has designed their own TBM based on the one they purchased. Their breakthrough is in bringing down cost per mile and time required to tunnel. As for requiring drivers, I believe that has to do with Nevada laws.

techdragon 4y ago
Having recently looked into the cost of tunnelling, I definitely see room for innovation, it’s an industry on the cusp of transition from “each time we make one of these it’s custom because <sound financial reasons>” to “I’ve got one that just finished its last project that should do the job for you” … similar to how extremely large cranes have become. Several decades ago if you needed a big mobile crane it was custom engineered and built… but industry advances and now you have companies like Liebherr building chassis and standard parts as a modular system and companies dedicated to owning and operating these reusable and reconfigurable pieces of specialist machinery so that when someone like SpaceX needs a crane for building a Starship launch tower or when Texas DoT need to move a huge bridge segment, they can just pay for the services of a company that operates one of these cranes, or even buy their own if they think they are going to need to use it a lot for a long time. There are still projects where the TBMs are considered disposable and the projects have them dig further than the required end of the tunnel and they just build a wall at the end of the tunnel and basically brick up the TBM like medieval monk… it’s becoming much less common as companies who build them have been designing machines to avoid such wasteful practices in order to hopefully decrease the cost of their own future machines by having parts to refurbish and reuse from TBMs that have finished digging… but for large TBMs it’s not a given that the TBM will ever dig another tunnel. Just like reusable all weather, airliner style rockets make it possible to decrease launch costs, the more standardised, all rock and soil capable, and reusable, a Tunnel Boring Machine can be made, the cheaper it should become to dig tunnels with it. It should come down to operating crew costs, worn cutting head part replacement costs, tunnel construction material (the tunnel lining) costs, and some transportation and logistics costs. With all the non recurring engineering cost cut away.

techdragon 4y ago

Having recently looked into the cost of tunnelling, I definitely see room for innovation, it’s an industry on the cusp of transition from “each time we make one of these it’s custom because <sound financial reasons>” to “I’ve got one that just finished its last project that should do the job for you” … similar to how extremely large cranes have become. Several decades ago if you needed a big mobile crane it was custom engineered and built… but industry advances and now you have companies like Liebherr building chassis and standard parts as a modular system and companies dedicated to owning and operating these reusable and reconfigurable pieces of specialist machinery so that when someone like SpaceX needs a crane for building a Starship launch tower or when Texas DoT need to move a huge bridge segment, they can just pay for the services of a company that operates one of these cranes, or even buy their own if they think they are going to need to use it a lot for a long time. There are still projects where the TBMs are considered disposable and the projects have them dig further than the required end of the tunnel and they just build a wall at the end of the tunnel and basically brick up the TBM like medieval monk… it’s becoming much less common as companies who build them have been designing machines to avoid such wasteful practices in order to hopefully decrease the cost of their own future machines by having parts to refurbish and reuse from TBMs that have finished digging… but for large TBMs it’s not a given that the TBM will ever dig another tunnel. Just like reusable all weather, airliner style rockets make it possible to decrease launch costs, the more standardised, all rock and soil capable, and reusable, a Tunnel Boring Machine can be made, the cheaper it should become to dig tunnels with it. It should come down to operating crew costs, worn cutting head part replacement costs, tunnel construction material (the tunnel lining) costs, and some transportation and logistics costs. With all the non recurring engineering cost cut away.