FBR General Discussion, page-4390

I agree, this is one of the best examples of a printed concrete home. The walls are relatively smooth compared with the "sausage" looking walls I've seen in other examples.

Compared with Hadrian X, these houses also need a facing applied as the surface is not smooth enough for a final finish. Also, internal walls needed to be also 2 layers thick to allow running of services, hence need slightly larger house dimensions for same room area. FBR hopefully brings on router in the future to make running of services simple, as this will still be difficult for FBR. Having said that, guess 2 layers does future proof for running of cables later.

They do talk about a position system which corrects the position 20 times per second. Guess the difference is with a "fixed" mounting structure it will need to deal with much smaller variations cf a 30m boom. So still see the FBR capabilities being far superior. We have a large technical advantage with DST which could be licensed in the future which might allow building concrete houses with boom based system.

Key advantage is the ability to level the top layer if slab quality is poor or layers are not square. FBR does not have a good mechanism to level out if the slab is not level or worse if there are some poor quality bricks in the batches not squared off correctly.

Points I noticed which are still challenges with the concrete build approach:
- gantry set up presumable is at least 1 day to set up and dismantle. Don't know if foundations are also required to support its weight ? Given the equipment size, this would require a crane to set up. On site concrete plant also needs to set up.
- like Hadrian X, all this equipment is not cheap so still has a capital investment required. Also 1 gantry system / concrete plant will at best complete the build in say 7 days (not 1-2)
- did not in indicate how many layers could be completed in 1 day. So how many days to complete? In the video they talked about a house which had been started 28 days earlier with roof trusses added. Hard to tell if this means build takes several weeks as concrete needs to cure. With the example where they are building 4 sites in the same location, they could just be moving crews between sites to drive efficiencies. However each time they shut down the site at end of day expect there is significant work to clean equipment.
- noticed on the video at least 4 people around the site. Assuming build takes at least 1 week to complete, this will be significantly higher labour costs than Hadrian X. FBR indicated that labour requirements were a key factor in profitability, even when discussing 2 versus 3 people running the Hadrian X.

So whilst this looks good in terms of finished product, think Hadrian X still has major advantages in terms of speed (say 1 or 2 day set up/ complete build), expect significantly lower labour costs given short build time (3 people for 1 day), no wait time for next services (eg. roof trusses).

Biggest down sides for Hadrian at the moment versus this example:
- capability not proven that Hadrian can consistently build at projected rates day in day out. Hopefully proven once unit is in US.
- high capital cost per Hadrian X creates a big barrier to entry. Need to proove the profitability to investors.
- even with the advantages of Hadrian X, its going to take a LONG TIME to build a signifiant fleet of Hadrian X to take it out of being a niche provider and being more generally available as an option for builders for large number of houses.

Time is most likely our biggest enemy, as in the short term the WAAS will only be able to build a small number of houses with 4 Hadrian X's, Meaning interested builders might want to use the service however but not be able to access. Then move onto other alternatives.

will be an interesting year !!