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My old foreman bet me $50 I couldn't lay 400 brick in a day without a jointer, and he was dead right
Back when I was still doing commercial work, my foreman Ray told me I was wasting time stopping every few feet to joint my mortar before it set up. He said a real mason strikes the joint once, at the end, when the wall is up. I argued with him for like 20 minutes and he finally pulled a $50 bill out of his wallet and said if I could lay 400 brick face brick in one shift and make it look good without jointing as I went, the money was mine. I took the bet on a Tuesday on a big apartment job off Lamar in Dallas. By hour four my mortar was so hard I was basically carving the joints out with a screwdriver and the whole bed looked like a rat chewed it. Ray didn't even gloat, he just walked over, picked up my jointer, and fixed about six courses while I watched. I lost the 50 bucks and honestly that was the cheapest lesson I ever got. Now I want to hear from the old heads, do you joint as you go or wait, and does it change with the weather?
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olivia_lewis914d ago
That line about carving the joints out with a screwdriver got me, because I did almost the exact same thing on a brick mailbox job in August. My uncle told me jointing as you go was for guys who didn't trust their mortar, so I waited until the whole thing was up. By then it was pushing 95 degrees and that mortar was like trying to rake concrete. The joints came out so rough the homeowner asked if it was supposed to look rustic. I had to chip half of them back out and redo it, which took twice as long as jointing as I went would have. Learned right then that heat changes everything and nobody is too good to stop and joint.
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