OJB (Houston) - Taylor - 7

 Hello everyone! I hope everyone's lives are going great and yalls internships are fun right now. I had a more interesting past 2 weeks, so more pics 🥳.

Last Friday the office was invited to tour Belgard Commercial's manufacturing plant here in Houston. Belgard specialize in a few hardscape products such as concrete pavers, porcelain pavers, retaining walls, and rooftop pavers and supports. It was super fun and interesting to see the behind-the-scenes processes that go into mass producing some of the products we spec.

This is a quick summary of my experience, just thought I would share. I might not be remembering a few details right but I'm trying my best.

The process begins with various bits of rock getting dumped into a funnel (yellow cage on the left) where it gets conveyed up to that rectangular structure in the top right. The rock gets sorted, sifted, and screened as it drops into a couple different hoppers.

Different ratios of color compounds, additives, aggregate, cement, and water are mixed depending on what the paver color and size call for. The mixture is them emptied out gradually onto another conveyor and runs on this track where it's stamped with a mold. We had to wear earplugs because each time it molds a set of pavers it has to vibrate the plate which is super loud 🔊.

Each of those plates are then raised on a lift in stacks of 14, where this yellow machine rolls around and places them on a curing rack. We got to see the command center where 1 guy runs the whole operation. They have full models of each of these machines on screen which was cool to see.

The pavers that are ready to be taken out are conveyed back out on this track, where this guy's entire job the whole day, is to look at the pavers and discard any imperfect product he sees. The pavers are then squared (pushed together), lifted, then stacked on top of one another.

Those stacks are put on pallets and wrapped by a machine, where another guy labels them and drives them over to storage.

Pavers that have a tumbled edge are separated and put through a concrete mixer-like machine that roughs up the edges. We weren't shown any other facility/machine that created other finishes so this plant might not manufacture those.

Endless product. This kinda intrigued me the most. The actual plant took up about 5%-10% of the total property area. The rest was storage.

Jules, TJ, and I. all of us work in the same little pod so it was fun to visit the plant with them.

Hope yall enjoyed my little summary, I hope it made sense. My mom and I are watching the Yankees play later today against the Astros, go Yanks! Astros fans out there (Isa that I know of) your team sux. Anyways have a good weekend everyone!