Tunnels are tricky business. You must first bore through the earth, then you either shore up your hole and begin walling it in, or do the digging and wall-building simultaneously using a huge Tunnel Boring Machine similar to the one munching its way beneath London, laying the foundation for the new Crossrail train system. But giant machines move slowly, and regardless, tunnel construction tends to be a tedious process. Not so if you have the “Zipper Truck,” a tunnel-creating invention that situates a half-cylinder-shaped array of rollers atop a regular flatbed truck. (As distinct from other “zipper trucks” that rearrange highway barriers.) Thought up by Lock Block, Ltd., the Zipper Truck works with the company’s special Lego-like arch blocks to quickly set archways to support tunnel roofs. While it’s been in use for a few years, we just stumbled across the special truck in a video posted to Tech Insider.
The caveat with the zipper truck, of course, is that the tunnel must first be dug, or assembled on flat ground before earth is poured over the creation. Anyway, the Zipper Truck features a hemispherical array of rollers that run down the truck’s length. The roller array is tilted at an angle, with the front situated higher than the rear. During an archway’s construction, workers assemble the first “layers” of Lock Blocks’ locking blocks atop the rearmost portion of the Zipper Truck, setting the first...