Tyndall Air Force Base Hurricane Michael Recovery Industry Day #3: Construction Materials and Methods Focused Panel Discussion (PART 2 of 2)
(4 Points, IAC Acoustics, Insular Corp, Gigacrete, ICON)
Industry Day is a collaborative effort where senior military and business leaders come together to discuss innovations and the future of Tyndall Air Force Base and the impact to the community. We realize there is no better way to rebuild Tyndall AFB without a partnership that includes both the local community and Industry. This is our third Industry Day in what we hope will be a series of exchanges to help identify innovative ways to move forward as we rebuild Tyndall together. On behalf of the Air Force we are pleased that you have taken time away from your busy schedules to assist us with the rebuild at one of the Air Force’s most important bases in its inventory.
Industry Day was held at Florida State University – Panama City’s Holley Academic Center, Panama City, Florida
Transcript
Andrew Dennis represents GigaCrete. He’s an architect, industrial engineer and the chairman and founder of GigaCrete Inc. He’ll be sharing ideas on modular high-performance green building materials.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Thanks for having me back again. I see quite a few faces from AFWERX from Las Vegas. Speed reading is encouraged. I’m gonna go through a few things that are really world’s firsts, that I started doing this back in the ’80s, it was supposed to be a vacation home for me and it turned into global housing. It’s also turned into the world’s only ballistics plaster that goes on a wall. You’ll see in a couple of slides later, that we’re at the point now where we’re actually starting, 50 caliber. So real quick on this on. I’ve got 24 slides to get through in 15 minutes. We thought we were the first environmental building system, because we’re not using wood, not using Portland cement, not using silica sand, we’re not using anything that’s toxic. The original name, GigaCrete, was actually two binders that I invented where we held together things like waste stream materials, recycled materials. And we don’t even make it anymore. We could if we wanted to, but we found a better way, and it’s actually very, very similar to the gentleman that just stood up here. So we have a few things where we overlap and a few things where we think we have an advantage. So apart from winning some of the awards there, we have a bunch of structures now that have been through, Joaquin, Matthew, Maria, Irma, and very recently, in the Bahamas, Dorian, with no damage, none at all. Knowing what Tyndall needs here we are planning on putting a factory here anyway. Whether we get Tyndall work or not. Governor, now senator, Rick Scott, in 2017 flew out to see me in Las Vegas, said, “we need you in Florida.” So that instigated the Florida Dade County Approvals, which we only got in March of this year. And we’re rated now at 245 mile an hour constant wind speed, we had no failure. That was the limit of their test equipment. So we actually don’t know what limit we can actually take. Back in 1912, the Saffir-Simpson scale, was developed, and in red at the bottom you’ll see there that old rules are based on old technologies, and times have changed and so should the codes. There’s talk now of creating a category six or even seven. And if we extrapolate the differences between one and two, two and three, and so on, we’d actually be a seven. And we still don’t know where the failure is, failure rate on that is? No point on laboring on this one. We’ve talked about this pretty much all day in one way or another. What’s needed here is, and I remember from the AFWERX thing in Las Vegas, the gentlemen that come in from the Pentagon said, I’m writing one check out, if it fails you don’t get it rebuilt. So it was pretty important that everything had to be minimum category five. We fit into that very easily. This is some historical fact, we’ll take two seconds on this one, it’s pretty obvious. Since 1851 and 2006, this isn’t even updated, we’re right in the middle of it. This was a shock to me, I grew up in England, I’m sort of up there in the top right-hand corner. Never had anything like what I’ve seen here. The devastation, last time I was down here, a couple months ago, even as far inland as 80 miles, was just unbelievable. I couldn’t believe trees could be snapped off like that. So, we’re, much like the previous speaker. We’re a steel frame building system. But conventional steel framing, even though it’s stronger than wood takes a lot of time. You’ve got to measure individual studs, you’ve got to make sure everything’s parallel. And what we’ve come up with is a much faster way of doing it, by actually using the insulation and pre-cutting into the insulation which is thick EPS foam. We start at six inches and got thicker than that. We cut into that, where the steel component, the structural elements are now dedicated and drop-in. So it’s very, very fast to do that. So we’re not a prefab, we’re not prefabbing a panel, we’re not a SIPs panel, structural insulated panel, typically wood, some people are now doing it out of steel. So there’s no wood, no gypsum board at all, that’s were we differ from everybody else. We have no rot, mold or mildew. If you have another system that still needs wood facings on it, or a still needs gypsum board on it, you’re still exposed to mold and mildew if it gets wet. We use no Portland cement, and we’ve no silica sand. We took silica out in 2008, way before it became popular to remove it, and what is ultimately gonna be mandatory. If you cut into it, and it’s got silica, or it contains crystalline silica, crystalline silica is a know carcinogen. So we are at basically at the same coast as stick-build, depends where it is, if it’s in the Bay area, where labor is incredibly high, then we’re way under stick-build costs, sometimes half the price. We start at, R28, which means with our coatings on it, you’ll see on a slide later, the coatings actually never touch the steel. So the steel’s centered in the foam. R28, is also an interior wall, which means, every panel is a structural panel, every panel is an insulated panel. And we have 50 to 60% energy savings. So if you wanna go off the grid, it’s 50 to 60% less solar panels. Visualize a big block of foam, 10 feet long, lay it on a table, cut into it with multiple hot wire cutters. And then slice through and create 48 linear feet of panels in seven minutes. So cut into that foam, is where you can see the ‘C” section, where’s the laser? You can see where the “C” stud now drops in, next to that, on both sides of that, is a vertical electrical chase. We have a corner, a 90 degree corner and we have a “T”, a “T” is an intersecting wall. So stacked panels arrive on a job site like this. These are pre-made headers and what we call a cell panel or footer that goes underneath the window. So all those rough openings have been pre-made for you, everything is tagged. These also correspond to the installation drawing, just like the previous speaker. Here the conventional steel bottom track is being put onto the slab, it would have a vapor gasket underneath it, the panel’s being cut with a hot wire. So it now slots directly over the track. So if it’s a six inch stud, it’s an eight inch piece of foam. If it’s a two-by-four stud, it’s a six inch piece of foam, or it could be thicker. So it’s very, very quick to drop this over, slide down our patented connector. Our patented connector is two, two-by-fours, connected together, forming basically an I-beam. So it’s pretty obvious to an unskilled worker where it fits, and where it doesn’t fit. So that now locks two panels together, but that’s a four-by-four. Two, two-by-fours, has to be a four-by-four. So we have a four-by-four and then a 24 inches on the center, and a two-by-four, and then the next panel connecting four-by-four again. So it’s four-by-four, two-by-four, four-by-four. People don’t do this. We start at 18 gauge and go thicker. We have a hurricane anchor. I submitted this originally in 1984 to Miami Dade, I wanted to do something in Florida. And when I was younger I used to mess around with car engines, and I thought, head bolts do a fantastic job of pulling ahead, sorry about this, pulling the head into the block. So by doing this, we’re actually tying the roof, through the wall, through that vertical hole next to the stud, into the slab. So now we tighten the house down and we pull the house into the slab. The house is now in compression. And for a hurricane to rip the roof off, I’ve got to pull the whole house and slab out of the ground, it’s never happened, it won’t happen. We clocked 268 when the anemometer on the top of the house on St Thomas blew of, but no damage to the house. Here you can see the final coatings have gone on on both sides. The coatings don’t touch the steel at any point. So we have at least an inch of foam, between the outside, it’s actually an inch and 3/16 to an inch and 1/4, from the surface temperature on outside or inside, before you get to the steel. So it’s actually got to jump through the coating, through the foam, though the steel, and back out the other side, it doesn’t happen. Our roof brackets, 3/16 minimum, usually 1/4 inch steel, way beyond anything in the industry. Nobody does this, the hole in the top there could be, and the ones on the left here, you see right here, this is where the hurricane anchor, that goes from the roof, goes through the wall. So now this is bolted to the roof joists, all steel no wood, and tightened down. Here’s a typical roof joist, two-by-twelve, steel studs. In this case, 14 gauge, very thick. Electrically, because I said earlier, with the electrical chases run vertically next to every stud, it means you’ve got infinite capabilities. Here’s a stud, here’s a chase on this side, here’s a chase on this side. So I can now, put electrical outlets anywhere on a wall, very, very quickly. Little hot wire tool, cuts a piece of foam out, you put two screws in here and you just put, you’ve installed an electrical outlet in less than a minute-and-a-half. Plumbing, same tool, change the wire shape, put it in the wall, take your slicer our, put your PEX tubing, in this case, copper seems to have gone by the wayside now, or vent tubes and then we have a Class A, fire rated foam that’s injected, that’s part of the kit that comes with it. And now you’ve insulated the pipe, hot stays hotter, cold stays colder, no freeze store issues. We’ve got installations from Alaska to the deserts, our western deserts and it gets pretty hot, all the way to equatorial jungles in Columbia. We’ve got product in Africa, we’ve got product in New Zealand. So we’ve covered pretty much every climate change. So the only skilled labor on the job is the final finishing, that’s the icing on the cake. And we actually train people at the factory here, we’re aligning with a local college and we’re gonna create training courses for panel installations, and panel finishing. This is our coating, you can see, here we have a mesh, we put a thin coat straight on the foam. We press in an, 11 ounce, minimum 11 ounce, fiber glass woven mesh, and then put the second coat directly over it, bonding the two together. However, technology is crystalline, water goes in it, stays in it, wet weight and dry weight are the same. We’ve no evaporation, like you do with Portland cement. So with that crystalline process, now grows into the foam, you can not get it off. That’s were we’re hugely different than everything else, out in the market, there’s no polymers, there’s no acrylics, that is super tough. Our interior finish is 9000 psi, and our exterior finish, this particular one, 3500, and still capable of taking the weight of the vehicle. At the bottom there, in red again, we passed the missile impact test, Dade County test, 12 flying two-by-fours, bounced off it. The testing agency asked if we had Kevlar in it and I said no, we don’t need it. Up on the right here, real quick, I’ve got maybe four minutes. Right here is a vault door that was given to us by DOE from Y-12, and it had been shot, or not this particular one. A vault door within a nuclear power station had been shot with a 50 caliber that made a hole right through it. The door was breached with the plastic explosives. And the special ops guys that were asked to break into the power station got all the way to the fuel rods very, very quickly. So we were asked, could we fill with our BallistiCrete product, could we fill the hollow vault door, and we did. This is the ranger that took the shot. I’ll try not hitting him in the butt with a laser. And the bullet hit here and bounced off, and put a one millimeter dent in it. So the spotter next to him, Rich, come over to me afterwards, I didn’t know him prior and he said, like, “I’m retired, what the hell is this stuff, I wanna get involved with this.” So we trained him, he’s now our “veterans only” installation crew in Phenix. They range up to four to twenty people, they’re all vets, mostly special ops, they’re fantastic workers. So Rich is gonna help me anywhere we go, including here, to actually hire veterans and train them, and put the unit back together. So this was their first job, it’s 43,000 square feet. It’s in Gilbert, Arizona. And they finished this in record time. This whole thing, I think, was done in about two months. Here, top right, we trained this guy, his from the Bay area, this is LDS house, that they built in Accra, Ghana, West Africa. Day two, day four, day six, second story’s on, on day eight, the roof is on but not yet finished. Two months later, this is a 3,000 square foot house, by a bunch of kids, that showed up with flip-flops on a job site. They’d never build anything at all. So it’s very, very, simple. We pride ourselves of speed, simplicity, and picking up the guys from the, Home Depo wards, that are looking for the day labor. Value perspective, no point getting into this. These are typical codes that are needed. The one we’re most proud of now, and we’ve obviously gone through the mold, the mildew, and the fire test and all the rest of it, is the fact that we’ve gone through this Miami Dada County testing and blew them away, pun intended. By the end of the day we’re no more expensive, and can be less than a stick-build, with huge benefits, category five, no issues, every panel is an energy saver. Every panel is structural. Thank you very much. (clapping)
Thank you sir. Next up is Evan Loomis of ICON, he’s the co-founder of the Austin based startup ICON, the construction technologies company leading the way into the future for, of human shelter and home building using 3D printing and other scientific and technological break-throughs. How’s that for an intro?
Well, I’m really inspired by my fellow panelists, so congratulations, General, thank you, Swat, best dressed man Wahl, appreciate the invite to be here. He looked really good, and I was like, “man, if my wife were here, she’d like hit me in the elbows and tell me to dress like him.” I think we’re a little bit behind time so I’m gonna give a blitz on ICON, large construction scale 3D printing. My goal’s to keep you on the edge of you feet, (chuckle edge of your feet, edge of your seat. And I’ve got some videos that’ll kind of explain some of this. But just out of curiosity, how many people are familiar with 3D printing? So most everybody. How many people are familiar with 3D printing, something as big as a house? So about half, okay, awesome. Well, ICON is construction technology company. Our civilian mission, we’re gonna look at a DOD’ish presentation, but our civilian mission is, end homelessness. There are very few people that can afford houses in the United States, and one billion humans in the world do not have adequate shelter. And so, at the center of our company is a very humane cause, to figure out a way to dramatically decrease the cost of a house, increase the resiliency and increase the beauty, that our sisters and brothers have around the world. Specially here in the United States. Like most dual-use used technologies, what we use on the civilian side can be, kind of, clocked up and used on the military side. So military construction has had very little innovation for the last 100 years, maybe 500 or 1000 years. We’ve got bunkers, tents and boxes. And we think the future, especially on more austere environments and expeditionary settings, is the ability to pull our an iPhone, select whatever you want to build and push print, and make it that easy for us to do. A lot of use cases in within the military, combat, disaster, training, humanitarian. And this is a cool rendering, if you will, of something that we can do today. This is a 3D printed forward operating base. I realize that forward operating bases normally look like this, it’s a very beautiful mountain region in the background. This is something with one tool, a big 3D printer, that deposits concrete. You can build walls, towers, buildings, bunkers, really anything you can imagine. And it’s as easy as pulling you iPhone and clicking what you want, which is what I’ll show you in a minute. This is our Vulcan II technology. If you try and get an idea of how big this, it’s about as wide as our stage, it’s about 30 feed wide, about 10 feet tall. So anything within that box we can print, we can do up to about 2500 square foot building, and we’re about a year old. So this technology is, kind of at the Wright brothers airplane on it, where, like, bicycle parts, and we’re just now beginning to see, kind of, the power of what this technology can do. What large scale 3D printing is? It’s typically robotics, software and advanced materials. In our case, we’re using concrete, but there are a number of other companies that are using things that are not concrete. You can use geopolymers or different things like that. 3D printing, why 3D printing? There’re are a number of advantages to 3D printing. I’ll just mention a couple here, but speed, it’s really fast. I’ll show you some videos in a second. it’s fun when you’re on a job site looking at a big building that’s been 3D printed, it’s kind of fun and sexy for the first 10 minutes, and you’re like, “this is really boring,” there’s just nothing to do, it just (beeps) kind doing that. But, it’s really fast, the first house that we printed, and actually the only house that’s 3D printed in the United States is, we did it in about 47 hours, and the last one that we did, we did it in 24 hours of print time. So it’s pretty quick. It’s customizable. If you print a 1000 buildings in a row, all 1000 can be different, it’s just a digital design file. So upload a different file if you wanna different house. If you want all 1000 to look the same, you can do that too. The other thing, we’re taking concrete, we’re adding a little bit of pixie dust to it—
[Participant] (murmuring)
and pixie dust,
[Participant] (murmuring)
I can’t tell anybody what’s in the pixie dust, but it’s very special, yeah. If I told you, a lot of people would shoot me right now. But, yeah, we add the pixie dust, and you go from raw material to finished product, almost (snaps fingers) instantaneously. It’s really amazing, so that’s what helps us keep the cost low and the value high. This is the first 3D printed house in America, this is permitted by the city of Austin. I did this in my friend, Taylor’s, back yard. When I told him what I wanted to do. He told me I was an idiot, and I would not, I said, “if I’m successful I’m gonna give you a free house.” He said, “okay,’ and so he now has a free house in his back yard. And we did this first house with this pretty primitive robotics system, this is the Vulcan I, this is our first 3D printer. So that’s kind of our, Wright brother’s airplane. We upgraded to the, Vulcan II, and now it’s just a lot faster, and it can print a lot bigger. This is a house that we actually just showed off yesterday for the first time.
[Participant] (murmuring)
This one is only 500, this is in a homeless community in Austin, Texas, and they just wanted, nobody can get more than a 500 square foot house, but it can do up to 2500 square feet. So who doesn’t wanna live in that? I’ll live in that. The state of additive manufacturing today, this is my only slide with lots of words on it. I apologize, we can do up to about 2500 square feet. If you wondering, kind of, what the really hard part is, it’s kind of all of it (chuckles), but the mixing and pumping is not easy. It took a lot of PhDs a long time to figure out how to do this. And software, most of the time the problem is attacked by mechanical engineers, and they’re the right people for this job. But software is one of those things that’s often left out of the equation. It needs to be as easy to pull out an iPhone. Click on something and push print, and so we’re kind of creating that type of future. This’ll give you an idea of what it looks like when it’s printing. Some of these videos are online, so don’t feel like you need to record it now, if you don’t have to. And we’re printing our logo, so we’re kind of having fun this day. It’s accurate within millimeters, which is fine. So when you’re ready for windows, or your doors, it can just slot right in, and it fits perfectly every time. This is on a job site, that house that I just showed you a couple of seconds ago, this is that house going up, and there’s just a lot of people watching it and trying to make sure that everything’s okay. That’s kind of what it looks like. It’s pretty fun, but the goal’s boring. And, so you don’t want anything to happen out of the ordinary. And this is what the finished product looks like when you’re done. It’s just a beautiful, thermal envelope, that’s made out of concrete. The psi in our concrete right now is 6000 psi. We can juice that up quite a bit to make, to give our walls different material properties. But that’s, this is a very powerful building, certainly more powerful than a plywood box. In fact I paid this guy $20.00 to see if he could crack my wall, and we’ll see if he does. So over the bit of fragmentation, but he couldn’t get anything to crack, and he hit it about 20 times and he kind of gave up. And I don’t think he was real happy with me, but he was hoping he could actually do some damage. The software interface, you just Biocode in, you select whatever you want to print, these aren’t pretty screen shots, these are actually what we use. You click on what you want, the machine preps for printing, and it gives you a very simple set of procedures like, do you have any equipment on the print bed, yes or no? And when you’re ready to print, you monitor this, and it tells you exactly what to do and makes it pretty simple stupid to build a house, or build a structure, or bunker, or whatever you might want. It was actually so simple that the vice chair could use it. So this is General Wilson, and we just gave him the controls, we didn’t give him any coaching and he figured out how to use the printer within about a couple of seconds, so pretty fun. I’m not gonna go into this, but there’s a pretty powerful machine learning algorithm that that’s behind all this that captures all kinds of data as we’re printing. And so, the third house, the third building, the fourth building is better than the first one. It’s getting faster and better with these machine learning algorithms, so in a few years, we’re gonna be looking at, hopefully, totally different speeds, totally different design capabilities that we have. I just think this’ll be really fun, please these are just renderings, but wouldn’t it be fun to drop it out of an airplane. If anybody wants to partner on this, I just think that would be insane and fun to watch. And hopefully nothing breaks, but I’m sure something will. Likely, this is probably what the it looks like, we need to get our capability from civilian ready to the military, that’s you know, increased vibration loads, the ability to kind of just put it in a shipping container and send it anywhere in the world, and be ready to go really quickly. The other thing too, when you think about scale of the technology, if we have a 100 of these printers, we can do a 100 structures in a day. If we have 10 we can do 100 structures in 10 days. So you’re kind of limited by just how many of these printers you have. And if you want an, XY or Z, it’s all good, you just pull it on the job site and it gets printing. It’s really magical to watch. Again another rendering, we’ve never done this, but our graphic designer got carried away, so there we go. Some of the benefits for this are, rapid deployment, survivability, it’s very affordable, and there’s some ways that we can incorporate some advanced mixes inside of our concrete to give it some super powers. Then I’ll go over some of those, and just really quickly. We think we can get this to have some EMP resistant properties, this is one of the issues that was of interest to Dr. Roper and General Wilson, specifically. If a bomb goes off that the sensitive electronics are okay inside. I can’t go into how we can do that, but we believe we can. Blast absorbing, our head of material, scientist designed all the blase absorption concrete for the Air Force, and so we’re just gonna re-appropriate that tech within a 3D printer. Ultra high strength, to get the compressor strength up to like a landing strip for a Jet. We can get up to about 20,000 psi, to do runway repair, or just to have an area that can handle extra strength. Floating concrete, sounds fun, and camouflage concrete. Because of 3D printing, you can print whatever the design file has, and so you can do very complex geometries, like this. And then right next to it you can do a boring B-Hut, if you just need 30 by 60 building for troops or on-base housing. All right I finished before my time was up. Hopefully that’s a relief to you, so are we gonna do Q&A?
Yes Sir.
Okay, great. (clapping)
All right, this concludes our presentation. The floor is now open for questions. Again, we have a mic at the center of the room, so please raise your hand and one of our Lieutenants will bring you to the mic. Please state your name and the company, followed by your question. Thank you sir.
It’s Vince Pecoraro with AFWERX or Swat. You guys all displayed some really cool technologies, you kind of saw the plan laid out by the General earlier today, that there’s gonna be 12 large zones, that are put on contract, normally with a prime contractor. How do you envision yourselves interacting in that kind of an arrangement and bringing your tech to bare.
I’ll go first, we work with the design, the designers, early on hopefully. In our particular case, being an architect I speak the same language, so we would take the schematic design, the early design stage work, even at the 35% level, and help them be able to utilize our particular products within budget. We create budgets very early on, oftentimes from napkin sketches, so we can definitely help.
Anybody else?
And definitely involved in design upfront, especially if we’re going with an enduring product. But also probably working with a lot of the contractors to where the people gonna stay, where they’re gonna live, where they gonna eat. So I think there’s the logistics upfront of taking care of these families and groups, and then also, is this product gonna work into the modernness and futurist of the design.
Have another question over here.
Am I live, Steve Singleton, Z6 Commissioning. All these panelised building and 3D printing, you can bounce bullets off of them. But I test buildings for a living, and our problems always come in the penetrations, in the door openings in the window openings, HVAC allows air out. How does your different systems address those penetrations, water and air infiltrations to those penetrations?
Water and air for us, no issues, we’ve already gone through all those code approval processes. Doors and windows—
[Steve] That’s for your panel, I’m talking about when you cut a hole in it, and put a window in it.
Yes, then we’d have to use a manufacturer that’s already gone through those tests, if you want that kind of hurricane resistant doors and windows or moshi resistant. We don’t make those components so we’d have to ally with someone that does.
Anyone else? All right great. Have another question, over here.
(murmur) question for all the technologies how much per square feet?
You can just run ABCDE.
[MC] The question was, with all the technologies how much per square foot? We can start on the end, sir, if you don’t mind.
Sure, obviously depending what we’re building. But if you took a, just maybe a cabin, maybe just kind of look at that, that has a bathroom, maybe kitchenette, something like that, you’re probably, the square footage, ’cause they’re small the square foot price goes up.” But if you looked at something that typically cost us maybe $40,000 to build, we’re probably in the 20,000 to 30,000.
I guess in the SCIF world there’s different requirements based RF and the acoustics, but on average, just do a ball park, normal SDC-50 requirement, I see these like 40, $40 a square foot.
[Participant] What did you say?
40 a square foot.
All I’d ask, how you’re gonna finish the building? Are you gonna finish it with a brick on the outside, or Stucco, and what are you gonna finish the inside with. All of these things are gonna change the cost of the square footage price. I could say this, we’re gonna be comparable to Wood Frame or Block construction. So whatever you’re paying for that, we’re gonna be right in that ball park.
Pretty much the same answer here, our a kit, which would be everything, doors, walls, roof, finishes. Did I say doors, walls? Range from $38.00 dollars a square foot to maybe 50.00 on the higher end. It depends on the building design, how many walls are going on the inside, labor costs. You know on the Africa project, that entire 3000 square foot house was finished and is beautiful looking for about $100.00 a square foot, finished. A stick-built house in Las Vegas, where I live now, is 125.00 and up. And we’re coming in at that or below that, with a super insulated house that’s hugely different, you know, performance wise. So it depends on, again, you know, all day it’s been labor, labor, labor. I don’t know what the labor’s gonna cost here? The fact that we can take kids out of school and train them, at a say college, that cost isn’t gonna be high. This isn’t gonna be a Union project, I don’t think, is it, is this a Union job?
[Participant] I’m sure it’ll be (murmurs).
Union labor? (audience murmuring) I wouldn’t, okay, okay, we’d be as, he just said, we’re gonna be the same price or less than stick-build with huge difference in performance and energy savings, and much less than masonry. Masonry is slow, and mason now, the hourly rate for a mason is high, some framers now, on the West Coast are getting $75.00 an hour, non Union. So I don’t think you’ll run into that here.
I wish I had your accent. (laughing)
I was just gonna like, you know if I, I would sound smarter, is the end of it. Yeah, we’re really shooting for at least a $1000.00 per square foot, that’s another joke, okay. (laughing) You know the first, this is pretty sensitive information to our company, the first house that we did was under $40,000, and we’re under, we’re significantly cheaper than stick-build construction. ‘Cause, you’re just taking your raw material, typical concrete cost, $150.00 a yard. House takes couple dozen bags of concrete and you’re in business. It’s really cheap. But what we’re seeing right now is, because this technology is so new, it’s only one year old, it’s gonna, I think it’s price curve is gonna look like the impossible burger, which three years ago, the impossible burger was $325,000 dollars per burger. You guys, ever see that stat, and now it’s $11.00. And so we’re seeing the technology dramatically decrease the cost of this, and so I think, for ICON’s sake, the future’s really bright. How’s that for a non answer? Thank you, I’m gonna run for office.
And if you don’t mind, I just follow up. If you look at a container right now, they’re running between $1,700 and $5,000, $1,700 for a used one, $5,000 for a brand new one. So you’re starting at about $4.80, just for the structure, a square foot. So if you just took, wood structure or something else, compare, it’s under five bucks a square foot.
We have a question over there, sir.
Bernard Wright with Kirlin Builders. You actually just kind of answered my question, I was gonna ask, what do you prefer, are your containers ISO certified or are you using salvageable containers. So I guess you use them both, and the other question I had was, do you guys manufacture flat-packs at all? And are you looking at any type of flat-packs modification for possibly these man camps?
I’ll certainly look at it, to answer your second one, and, yeah, the first one, it depends on the mission you know, we get a lot of, one-trip containers. You see a lot of those, I man it’s a commodity. Every day I get prices, go up and down, but 17,00’ish, there’s some work you have to do to the inside, and it depends what’s going, what you’re gonna make it into, as well. So the price difference isn’t that great, brand new one either, but there’s a lot for great ones that are one-trip and available.
You have a question upfront, sir, good to see you again.
[Matthews] (murmur)
[MC] Sir, we have a microphone for you. There you go, just wait to get here, there you go.
Colonel Matthews Air Force Engineering Center. So Mr Klein, I have a question on your SCIF. Do you prefer to have those like exterior, so the one’s you showed were inside a hanger. As I look at life of our facilities in the future, how long we want it to be around for, the way our missions change. I see a lot of flexibility in that. So can they sit outside on their own, and how long would they kind of last on their own outside versus in a structure like an old hanger.
So there’s three way we build them up. So they can be outside, totally self supporting, multi-story. I think we build them out of thicker steel, that can sustain pretty big wind loads, I think 120, 140 something like that. So the other way is, because they are panelised, is to bring them in limited access structures, like put the SCIF in here, where it would be harder to bring a fully contained modular. Or we can just take the panels and put them on existing walls and put a SCIF in existing. Most of the time, because of the sensitive nature of the facility, you know, we like to hide in plain sight. So if we can put it inside an existing structure, that from OPSEC perspective, people like to do that. But certainly can make them free standing, and then pick them up and move just like a normal container modular SCIF as well.
[Matthews] Design the (murmur)
So they’re steel panelised construction, you know, decades.
Do we have any other questions? Over here.
My name’s Paul Nelson, with Tandem Roofing. We’ve got a 300 mile an hour wind rated roof that we’re selling for the same cost as a 130 mile an hour traditional metal roof. The roof, you all are using, are they using your tech or are you using traditional metal roofs?
You addressing me?
(cross talk drowns out speech).
Anybody wanna go first?
It’s just the accent. (laughing) We make our own roof panels, it’s a steel framed roof system, typically two-by-twelve, it’s insulated, usually at least 12 inches of foam. On the outside it can be whatever you want, it can be a metal finish it can be our StuccoMax finish, which is waterproof. Most of the homes that have survived all of these storms in the Caribbean have all had the exactly what I’ve just described with our coating on the outside of it, and it makes it cost effective. Decoratively in a lot of people, there’s a lot here, use the metal standing seam roof, and it’s colored and looks great. We can do that too.
I would agree with that, any normal roofing product on our panels would be acceptable.
Anyone else?
Sounds like you’ve got an awesome roof, we should talk. (chuckles)
He needs it.
Sir, you have a question.
I’m Tony Giordano, back door again One question but two parts, I don’t know if we’re allowed to do that. So post construction modifications, we all know requirements change, we know that design changes and things. If we had to go back in and do a HVAC change, or do electrical changes, or plumbing changes, could you elaborate a little bit about what it takes. ‘Cause it’s a pretty elaborate build, but then if you have to modify it, so that’s part one. Part town, we’re moving heavily into the age of wireless technologies, Bluetooth, everything else. With the materials you’re using, does interfere or have any issues with having that type of communications with inside the structure.
Okay, I love these questions, and they’re good. The fist one, because we got an extremely hard surface to the inside, 9000 psi, is considered ceramic. So anything that cuts masonry, like a diamond blade and a four and a half inch grinder will actually cut through it very quickly. You can evacuate the foam, pull it our, attach to the top and bottom tracks, it’s steel framing system, it’s no different than adding another steel frame wall to it. On the second one, we’re transparent, and more than you would even think, because we’re doing T-Mobile cell phone towers right now, that look like architectural buildings with the equipment behind it. The fiber glass panels that T-Mobile were using, and everybody else’s been using they loose three to six decibels and we’re zero to one, loss Which means the have better projections, less power. We’re doing some other stuff that I can’t talk too much about. All I can say is, it’s for a couple of the agencies that have three letters in them, and when you guys go to a foreign country you wanna leave something behind, to continue monitoring and I’ll stop right there. Because it is transparent and these things can communicate with each other. So when one of the agencies said to me, “can you make it look like a rock or a cactus,” I know exactly what he was talking about. So we are transparent, yes. Over the years I’ve done lot custom homes, and if anyone has ever built custom homes you’ll know there’s always changes, and with the panels it’s very easy, we’ve been able to go back, cut windows and doors in when people make changes, make adjustments move them over. It’s not a big problem to work with it. And as far as attenuation from the metal studs, I think you get a little bit on cellular phones, but not enough to make a big difference.
And the modular SCIFs the panels are meant to be removed and replace to do different modifications, and the second part, if introduce Bluetooth into the SCIF, you’re going to jail, (laughs), you’re going to jail.
[Audience] (mumbles)
Okay. (laughing)
Anyone else, sir.
I feel I have to answer, now they all went down the line. Yeah, I think, you know, in my house, I have to put repeaters. I think any wall, anything is going to, start, stop, but it also depends what you’re shooting out. So containers, the structure is really the strong part of what we want, the rest are metal walls that can be cut, moved done whatever we have to do. And depending what you’re really building, how much concrete, how much steel is, what you might have to do for WiFi and Bluetooth, and cell phones. But we operate on them right now, they’re fine, but it’s something that you want to think about as you’re designing.
[Audience] (murmur)
We’ve had no issue, I mean, yes, we’ve had not issues with cell reception or anything like that in our structures, so none of that. With the field of construction scale, 3D printing is changing really quickly. The first house that we did had electrical chases inside the wall that we just did after the fact. Because the city of Austin was like, “can you just do something normal, please.” Right, sure, and then, now we’re including it inside the chases of the wall, and it comes out just like any other electrical socket. So it’s changing really quickly, but ultimately the robotics is gonna be laying all those chases and printing 3D chases inside the wall cavity. So just, the robot knows what to do. It’s done, and you cable things through really quickly, you don’t have to spend three days kind of saw cutting, or drilling holes in the wall like traditional construction.
Do we have any other questions? We have one in the back.
With all the mentioning of green building and sustainability, lead certification. Does that mean that the coatings and finishes on your products have been studied or been tested for off-gassing?
Thank you for asking. Yes, everything’s edible, we only use non-toxic edible ingredients in both of our coatings. And I can prove you’ve eat it. I think we ought to have a YouTube challenge. (laughing)
We’re gonna go global it started right here. I don’t know if you can eat our stuff, our concrete. I would not recommend that. (laughing) But, I think that’s insane that you can do that. (laughing) Maybe in three years, I’ll be back and be like I ate it, but not sure. In terms of volatile organic compounds, all that kind of stuff. The coatings on the inside of our structures are No Vac, spray on pain and stuff like that. So I think, indoor air quality is a huge health hazard that is often overlooked. So we’re doing everything we can to make sure that the spaces that we live and exist are very healthy.
And with ours, with EPS foam there’s no off-gassing and no problems with that.
Anyone else? Any other questions, another one in the back.
Eric Cartner, SPS Services, all your technologies sounds great but how is it applicable to the tender rebuild. Are you, one all be, just your one source or you gonna work together or what?
Just listening to these guys there’s some really cool stuff up here, I could see how things could work together and definitely want to, you know, get some collaboration for sure. You know, anytime you go into a development, you don’t want it all the same, you want to have choices, and differences, it helps the eye, and I’m sure the designers have that in mind. So, yeah, we would like to do a lot here. We want to work and do what’s right, and what we think can help. And that’s from the immediate response with, you know, contractor living all the way through to maybe something cool that will be enduring and be able to change as the mission goes.
We’re a manufacturer, we’re not an installer, we need contractors here, we need contractors that want to learn a new way to do things, a quicker way to do it, a healthier way to do it, a much cleaner way to do it. We don’t even have a dumpster on the job site. The only thing left over are the empty bags which take a couple of trash cans and that’s all you’re throwing away. We are hiring obviously local labor at the factory, we’re creating local jobs for the installers, and that’s unskilled labor. We’re not looking for the skilled trapped craftsman, and I can say that we need Stucco applicators. We’re offering right now in Las Vegas, we do free trainings every Friday morning. In four and a half hours, we teach a builder how to build a house, mix the applications and put them on the wall, in four and a half hours. The guy that built the, I pointed it out on the slide, that we trained one guy, we sent him to Africa. He come in two Saturday, mornings, two months apart, and went over to Africa and built that home in two months. So we’re helping the community for sure. Our goal is actually about four factories in Florida, and one will be here. We’d like to help in anyway we that we can. We certainly would work with any other contractors that will be getting the contracts down here for the jobs. Or if they need assistance, and they need someone to do a turnkey job, we could also offer that to them. So either way, we just like to be able to help in anyway we could.
And we’re also a manufacturer and need a inter-rater to work through ourselves.
Any other questions, another one in the back.
Hey, how’re you doing. Vincent Weaver of VPG Construction. You all really haven’t discussed anything about the warranties, and I know a lot of your systems seem proprietary, as far as, if anything was to happen further down the line, you look at a regular, any piece of comment or fix a penetration in your systems. I know there’s some cross, I guess contamination when it comes to some of your systems that you offer. The container, or the concrete, full housing, as far as roofing warranties, those are different than your standard GC labor warranty. So if you all can discuss a little bit on the warranties, and you know, how you go about that?
We offer a 50-year warranty on both of our coatings, interior and exterior. Which would include the roofing as well. We’ve got a few million square feet of installations now, and not one call-back. Our product doesn’t shrink, it doesn’t crack, there’s no Portland cement in it. so we wouldn’t have any issue with a 50 year warranty.
Anyone else.
Sadly one of our containers blew across the thing and hit his building and it was still okay. (laughing) So I think we’re all right there. You know, you certainly are gonna have any of your HVAC, or just regular warranties and whatnot, but as the containment goes, where I think, then it’s gonna be a long time.
And gentlemen, new construction warranty is a year. But there are products, whether it be roofing or siding, that offer much longer warranties. So any of those products that would be used would be extended warranties. But as far as the construction of the building. Our building is not going anywhere, it’s been in use for over 25 years, and it’s held up extremely well. So I don’t think there’s any problem with warranties on it.
Anyone else? Any other questions? Have one right up front over here, LT?
So this one is specifically for ICON. I believe your guys are more a machine company than a building company, obvious from our discussions. If there is a builder here that wanted to get access to one of your machines, or utilize it in some capacity, what would they need to do to do that?
Because the technology is moving so quickly and we went from the Vulcan I, kind a very rudimentarius machine, you saw the Vulcan II within like six months,. It is best that our teams stay very close to the technology for the next few years, just ’cause it’s changing so fast. And we uncover insights and to make changes and machine learning algorithms and all that kind of stuff. So we’re probable a little ways away from us to say, “hey Swat, here ar the keys, eat your heart out.” Although, we’d like to get there sooner than later. One of our biggest investors is, D.R.Horton, which in Texas, where I’m from, that’s the biggest builder. I think they’re one of the biggest builders in the United States. They’re a partner with us, and so we’re beginning to do some of that incorporation with them on houses that we’re building, to partner with like best in class builders. And so, if there’s a builder that we end up wanting to partner with, we can certainly do that, we just can’t give them the keys quite yet.
Any other questions, questions, going once, going twice.