Brickmaking is a talented business that takes many years to conquer.
The bricks are laid in courses, on a bed of mortar, with a taut line used as a guide to line and level. The horizontal joint is the “bed joint”; Vertical joints are “perpends”. The ends of the walls are built first, regularly checking the level and verticality of the bricks while raising the corners / ends.
Gauge is also checked, to ensure four turns measure 300mm. The ends are usually “Racked Back”, shown in reverse, allowing successive courses to be placed directly on the string line while not having to constantly check the work with a spirit level. Bed mortar is laid and shaped to accept bricks. The end of the bricks to be tamped is greased with mortar and then forced into the previous bricks, compressing the mortar to a width of 10 mm. Bricks are pressed down to flatten the spade stub, and any excess mortar extruded from the bed or crossbar is scraped with the spade, then the method is repeated with subsequent bricks. Upon completion of each cycle, the guide line is moved to the next cycle. Although a stretcher link is used for most of the wall illustrations on this site, there are over thirty different brickwork links that can be used. 7 of our most beloved bonds are depicted on the walls page. With solid or perforated bricks, the alignment of the bricks is not important, but with frozen bricks, the frog should be placed in front. This ensures that the wall loading is distributed uniformly across its width, rather than on the perimeter, and that there are no voids in the brickwork that may be weak points masonry company near me.
Masonry should be covered with braided or perforated bricks if the remaining half is left finished for any period when it is about to rain, to prevent frogs or holes from filling up with water that would make a real mess of the mortar bed when construction resumes. Frogs are always positioned upwards. Covering a slurry of 1 meter of mortar will lay about 1800 bricks (1300-2100 depends on frogs etc.) or 1200 blocks measuring 450 x 225 x 100 mm. 1800 standard bricks = 30m and each cubic meter of mortar weighs about 2.1 tons, so each square meter of individual bricks needs approximately seventy kilograms of mortar. One ton of lime mortar will lay about a thousand bricks (700-1200) or six hundred pieces.
Marking is generally done an hour or so after the bricks have been laid, long enough for the mortar to harden although not so long that it becomes unusable.