Saw an old job site I worked on 20 years ago and the brickwork still looked brand new

I was driving through my old neighborhood in Cleveland last week and noticed a retaining wall I built back in 2003 still had perfect joints and almost no spalling. The mortar I used back then was just standard Type N with no additives, but now everyone pushes me to use these expensive polymer mixes. Has anyone else noticed older jobs holding up better than some of the modern stuff we're putting down?

2 comments

2 Comments

andrewh4310d ago

Buddy of mine does commercial flatwork, poured a warehouse floor back in '04 with standard 4000 psi mix, no fibers, no plasticizer. That floor still looks better than stuff he did last year with all the fancy admixtures. Makes you wonder if these additive companies are selling solutions to problems we never had.

sean_walker4510d ago

04 was a different era of concrete for sure. @andrewh43 I get what your buddy means, but I wonder if that old floor just got lucky with the right weather and curing conditions. One good pour doesn't prove much when we're talking about thousands of slabs that cracked or dusted over the years. The real question is whether those admixtures actually fixed a widespread problem or just gave contractors a new thing to mess up. Most of the time when I see a floor fail, it's because the crew didn't follow the mix design or didn't cure it right, not because the concrete itself was bad. You really think the additives are making things worse, or is it just harder to screw up a basic mix?