  Pair production of new vector-like quarks in $pp$ collisions is considered
model independent as it is usually dominated by QCD production. Nonetheless,
the presence of a new massive color octet (heavy gluon) in some composite Higgs
models may modify the pair production rate of vector-like quarks. This scenario
is considered and the possible differences between the usual QCD production and
the production mediated via heavy gluons is studied. The sensitivity to these
differences in the LHC (run-1 and run-2) are studied. No sizeable differences
have been found, which suggests that the published experimental results can be
easily reinterpreted by a simple cross-section scaling. This reinterpretation
has been also done for the run-1 results published by the collaborations.
