Making sense of what you see on a job site

(gentle music) - Let's see if we can make some sense of what's happening out here on our construction site. What you're looking at is concrete formwork and on top of that we're gonna cast a big, thick concrete slab that we call a podium deck. The purpose of the podium deck is to support the wood framed apartment building that we're gonna build on top of it later. So, where you see the vertical rebar sticking up out of this concrete slab, those are columns that are underneath this slab holding it up. So the columns support the concrete slab, the concrete slab supports the wood frame apartment structure that's gonna be built on top later. Now where you see the horizontal rebar going through the slab, that's all of our concrete reinforcing that has to be in the right place in order for this structure to work. Where you see those red pipes sticking up out of the concrete slab, those are sleeves. In this concrete slab, if you picture on top of it a bunch of apartment buildings being built, you gotta remember that in those apartment buildings we have bathrooms and we have sinks and showers and tubs and all of that requires water source and drains. That's what those red sleeves are for. And they all have to be in precisely the right place because that sleeve has to be in the wall so that we hide all of our pipes and drains in the wall. It's not good enough to be plus or minus an inch or two. We can't do it the other way around and just move the wall so that it covers up the drain that happens to be in the wrong place, because then the wall is gonna be in the way or doors might not open, our sink might not fit. And if it's wrong, you might end up with a drain in the middle of your living room, or you might end up with something sticking out in the middle of your doorway. (giddy music) So how do we take care of that? How do we make sure those things happen? We use the laser scanner that you see running there in the background. That's constantly taking millions of points of data and measuring where all of the rebar is being placed and where all of those red sleeves are being placed to ensure that they're in the precise location. Because if they're not in the precise location, the fix is that we have to chip out a bunch of concrete and move things, and that costs time and that costs money. So this is one more example of how we leverage this technology on today's modern construction site to avoid expensive rework that makes these projects go out of budget. (gentle music)