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Shoutout to the old timer who caught my head joints on that Flemish bond last Tuesday
I was laying a garden wall out in Brighton last week, about 14 courses up, and this retired mason named Walt who lives nearby stopped to watch for a minute. He asked why I kept buttering both sides of every head joint on a Flemish bond when the queen closers were already eating up my spacing. I told him I do it on running bond all day so I just kept the same habit, and he shook his head and said that is why my courses were creeping a quarter inch by the time I hit the top. He had me dry lay the next 5 courses without mortar first, and sure enough the closers were throwing off my gauge by almost 3/8 inch over that run. I pulled the top 4 courses and redid them with a thinner head joint on the queens and the sill course landed dead level for the first time all day. Cost me two hours but he probably saved me from coming back to fix a bowed wall in a month. Anyone else had an old timer catch a habit you did not even know you had?
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amyr5718d ago
Honestly a quarter inch of creep over 14 courses sounds like it would've just gotten covered by the coping and nobody would ever know. Walls move and settle anyway, and pulling 4 courses for 3/8 inch seems like a lot of work for something that small. Maybe Walt was right about the habit but I'm not sold that it was a bowed wall waiting to happen. Plenty of old walls out there were built way sloppier than that and they're still standing a hundred years later. Not saying don't listen to the old guys but sometimes they make a mountain out of a molehill.
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