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The old gray book at the union hall had a mortar mix ratio I never knew
I was waiting for a meeting last Tuesday at Local 4's hall in Akron and flipped through this 1962 manual someone left on the table. It said for soft brick, you drop the lime down to 1 part and crank the sand up to 6. I always used 1:1:5 from what my foreman showed me. That little tweak makes the mud way more workable on old facades. Has anyone else run into an old spec sheet that corrected something you'd been doing for 15 years?
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amybarnes2mo ago
A buddy of mine who does restoration work up in Cleveland found something similar a few years back. He was patching a 1920s bank and kept fighting the mortar because it was drying too fast and cracking. Then he dug up an old county spec sheet that said to soak the brick before laying and back off the lime like you said. He tried it on the next job and said the mud stayed soft almost twice as long, made all the difference on that curved archway.
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