The Boring Company and its eccentric CEO have come up with some interesting ways to finance their tunneling aspirations, not least of all a plan to sell working flamethrowers. A newly announced piece of merch to be offered by the firm will be more closely tied to its digging ventures, fashioning the rock it pulls from the Earth into Lego-like bricks for construction.
Since emerging in early 2017, The Boring Company has shared a few key ways it thinks it can improve on current tunneling methods. Its mission is to cut the costs by a factor of more than 10 and get boring machines to burrow through the Earth a lot faster than they currently do.
Shrinking the size of the tunnels they dig is one way of doing this, with the company planning to craft 14-ft-wide (4.25 m) tunnels rather than the typical 28-ft-wide (8.5 m) tunnels currently used for one way roads. It is also looking to triple the power of these machines and automate them to run on their own.
When it outlined these strategies in May last year, it also revealed it was investigating technologies that would turn excavated dirt into bricks for construction. Current approaches to tunneling see half the time spent digging and half the time spent building support structures for the tunnel. The Boring Company believes it can do both simultaneously, pulling material from the Earth, turning it into bricks and using them to support the tunnel behind the machine as it goes.
The company now appears to have made some solid progress in this area. Musk announced on Twitter on Monday that The Boring Company would start selling bricks made from these materials some time in the near future, to be shipped worldwide.
"New Boring Company merch coming soon," he tweeted. "Lifesize LEGO-like interlocking bricks made from tunneling rock that you can use to create sculptures & buildings. Rated for California seismic loads, so super strong, but bored in the middle, like an aircraft wing spar, so not heavy."
Expanding on this, Musk has revealed that the "First kit set will be ancient Egypt –pyramids, Sphinx, temple of Horus, etc." And in response to a question from another Twitter user about using these bricks for low-cost housing, he said, "Yeah, the boring bricks are interlocking with a precise surface finish, so two people could build the outer walls of a small house in a day or so."
In other Boring Company merch news, Musk also said Monday that flamethrower deliveries would probably kick off in May.
Source: Twitter
