The day I realized I was buttering my brick ties wrong

I was on a job in St. Louis last Tuesday, watching a new guy lay out his ties. He was twisting them all sideways, and I told him to stop... then I realized I'd been doing the same thing for 6 years. The buttered mortar should be on the vertical face, not the horizontal bed, or the tie just slides around when you lay the next course. Has anyone else caught themselves doing a bad habit for ages before it finally clicked?

2 comments

2 Comments

james9953d ago

Yeah but you're not totally right about that. The mortar goes on both the vertical face AND the bed if you want it to actually hold. If you only butter the vertical face, you're still gonna get sliding once the weight of the next course hits it. I watched my old foreman do it both ways for years and the ones that held best had a solid butter on the bed too, like a full trowel spread not just a dab. Plus if you're working with block instead of brick, the whole thing changes because the cores need to line up different. That new guy might have been onto something depending on what material you were using.

allen.amy2d ago

Man I feel you on that. That part about the cores on block needing to line up different is something too many people overlook. I've seen guys try to treat block just like brick and it never works the same way. The sliding thing you mentioned is real too - I've had courses shift on me when I didnt lay enough on the bed and it was a pain to fix. Your foreman sounds like he knew his stuff, doing it both ways and seeing what holds over time. It's good to hear from someone who actually watched the difference instead of just guessing.