Hadrian sets new speed record

Hi all,

The blog's back and Hadrian is breaking its own records. It's been a while since we've posted a blog but by popular demand we've brought it back. The last few months have been pretty exciting for FBR, with completion of H04 commissioning, completion of the first stage of our shipbuilding robot program with Samsung, sale of our first Mantis unit, and now some exciting new performance benchmarks for the future of construction.

After we completed H04 commissioning with the standard concrete blocks we've been using in the United States, we conducted some builder demonstrations and some testing with other block types, including the large format Wienerberger Porotherm blocks that we used in one of the houses we built and sold in Wellard with H02.

For our testing, we recreated our standard building design we use in our Factory Acceptance Testing with some minor layout changes to accommodate 500mm x 250mm x 249mm block dimensions.

We then built the structure using the Wienerberger Porotherm blocks at a rate of 36 square metres of wall per hour, building the entire structure in one hour and 21 minutes. This smashed our previous record of 24.4 square metres of wall per hour in a comparable structure, set by H03 using standard CMU blocks. In a Western Australian context, we would be replacing both the internal and external leaves of a double brick cavity wall with one block, so in reality you're replacing 72 square metres of the wall design per hour.

That per hour rate included approximately 9 minutes total of production delays, with the longest of those being just under one and a half minutes. We measure from first block down to last block down, called the effective lay rate.

In the interest of transparency, we've decided to release the raw unedited footage of the build for everyone to see. This includes footage from inside the truck and shows any delays or manual intervention throughout the build. We didn't use adhesive on this build because we need to reuse the blocks (you can tell they've been heavily reused already) but the build time would be more or less the same if we had.

One of the important parts of building with the Wienerberger Porotherm blocks is that the blocks are laid very closely together with the interlocking tongue and groove system. We have pretty much perfected that now with H04 allowing for block tolerance. This is harder than it sounds for a variety of reasons but we've done it now.

We haven't come across anything in our construction technology space quite as transparent and open as this video so hopefully it encourages some of our peers to take the same leap and release unedited footage of what their technology can do. I look forward to providing further updates as we progress with Hadrian, Mantis, Firehawk (watch this space) and our shipbuilding application.

Mark Pivac
Chief Executive Officer
FBR Limited