By IANS,
London: A Dutchman has designed a machine that takes the sweat out of bricklaying and also does it in a jiffy, especially in road building.
Named Tiger-Stone, the amazing machine can create an instant road wherever it travels, laying out bricks in formation to create perfect paving. Its secret lies in a smartly designed gravity-based system.
All a worker has to do is load the bricks into the Tiger-Stone in the desired pattern. From there, gravity causes them to slide together in a sheet of paving on the ground.
Brick roads have long been sought after due to their attractiveness and durability but have become less common because of the labour-intensive work that goes into laying them, compared to other road surfaces such as concrete or asphalt, the Daily Mail reports.
However, with a Tiger-Stone, workers are able to lay out 400 square metres of new road every day, using paving stones or bricks, compared to a single conventional paver on their hands and knees who could only lay 75 to 100 square metres each day.
The machine is the brainchild of Henk van Kuijk, director of Dutch industrial company Vanku, who came up with his ground-breaking invention after deciding that squatting or kneeling down to place the bricks on the ground by hand was hard work.
The device, which is as wide as a road and comes in four, five and six-metre widths, is fed loose bricks and lays them out onto the road as it slowly moves along. The tread-tracked machine is electrically-powered and has few moving parts, so noise and maintenance are minimum.
Once the bricks are in place, all a contractor has to do is go over the new road surface with a tamper, and the new highway is complete.