"1. that with all the builder and brick experience FBR has had...

"1. that with all the builder and brick experience FBR has had access to, that they only recently discovered this.2. that no one with builder experience on this forum had brought this up."

It might just just be a bit of fluff for the talk. Mark is an engineer himself, he must have a pretty good understanding of thermal expansion.

It's not usually a problem with small buildings, especially with regards to bricklaying. String lines, profiles are either fixed to the house or existing brickwork so it pretty much all expands as the same rate. It's certainly not taken into account by bricklayers on small jobs or any job i've been on for that matter other that having expansion joints if needed, but even that's just mostly due to earth movement.

The HX is different because it's completely independent from the brickwork and guided by lasers which is why they notice the thermal expansion, unfortunately it's not really anything to do with speed. I would imagine they can pretty accurately map the current weather temp to the rate of expansion of a block and take it into account.

I don't feel it was ever much of an issue, just a bit of wank talk during the conference.