Pointing

[meany]

I am doing a pointing job where the mortar joints are only about 2-3mm,struggling to get the pointing trowel in the actual joints. Does anybody have a different method of doing this kind of work?The job is on old terrace house with Accrington brick.The mortar is sand and cement with red dye.Thanks carl

[lutonlagerlout]

im a bricky and i have never seen joints this tight apart from on stonework
maybe www.easipoint.co.uk can help ya
LLL

[GB_Groundworks]

we did a old house in wilmslow near manchester and it was built in accringtons, funny sizes as well they are like 8 3/4 inches long or something.

our brickies used now not sure what its called but we call them a fine tool. like what a painter would use, small trowel head on one end about 40mm long by 20mm then a small rectangular bit on the other end.

only pic i have on laptop kind of showing it but really tight beds



gi

[lutonlagerlout]

its called a small pointing tool,marshalltown do them
but i never saw joints less than 5mm in my life on bwk
LLL

[GB_Groundworks]

called accrington nori because the mould maker got iron the wrong way round apparently, other story says the guy painting the name on the chimney started with I and worked upwards.



laid with literally no bed, us northerns are tight remember don't want to go wasting expensive mortar

[GB_Groundworks]

one for the brickies brick collection photos

[Tony McC]

Some of those bricks are quite interesting, as they hail from clay 'oles close to where I've spent most of my adult life. The main picture shows a brick from Gadbury, which was adjacent to the Pretoria Colliery in Atherton, scene of one of the worst mining disasters ever experienced by the South Lancashire coalfield. The site has recently been re-opened to vehicular traffic by means of an access road linking the Atherton end of the Leigh By-Pass to the bottom of North Lane.

The Hindley Green Plastic bricks were manufactured across from the house where we lived when first married. Although the works had shut down many years before we moved there, the remnants of the old works was still extant at the back of a pub known officially as The Red Cat but universally referred to as The Dead Rat, and there were/are hundreds, if not thousands of old bricks lying around the site. Despite being named as Hindley Green bricks, the area is known locally as Tamar (pronounced Tammer, not Taymar).

Meanwhile, the Swan Lane bricks do come from Hindley Green, and the clay 'ole is now a water feature in the middle of a 1960s housing estate.

There was a third brickworks working the same seam of brick clay. This one was based on Wigan Road in Leigh and the clay 'ole was used a a landfill site from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s. Some canny developer decided to build a housing estate right next to the landfill site and there was a bit of a ruckus when it was discovered that landfill gas (methane) was seeping up through the floors of many of the houses and extensive, expensive remedial work was required to make the houses habitable and saleable.

I love all this old industrial archaeology. Mrs Taz thinks I'm sad for collecting old paving, especially clay pavers, so it's reassuring to learn I'm not alone in my fascination with our construction heritage.

[GB_Groundworks]

on the above mentioned wilmslow job we had to buy salvaged bricks from a pub in southport that was being knocked down, and then clean them by hand almost 40 packs in the end, put they are very very hard bricks. looking at the site today they are used in acid applications and power stations. good old northern clay, i thought yo might like that link tony. my dads a gorton boy and they used to go swimming as kids in the old gorton clay pits or so he says haha.

[lutonlagerlout]

they look right hard bricks, bet they are heavy,engineering bricks are made by machine so the tolerances are better but 5mm is about the limit.
most of the bricks down this way are soft(luton greys,bovingdon berries ,matthews ATRs) but thats due to the clay and the way they are fired
i spoke to the gaffer the other day and in our 8000 cottage garden rose bricks we found one with "tento" scratched on the face. we thought maybe some wag in the brick yard had done it at 10 to 5 but the gaffer reckons it may be a dutch brickyard
will take a picture when i get a minute
used to be 50 brick kilns in the chilterns after WW2 ,theres only 3 now but a lot of B roads are called "brick kiln lane"
LLL

[meany]

Thanks for the replies chaps.What i've done is grouted the Accrington brick walls then after an hour or so rub it down with fibreglass insulation,then go over with pointing trowel. There is a slight dullish cement residue on the sufaces so I'm tempted to acid wash after a week but acid will probably attack the cement with the 2-3mm joints. I think i will apply linseed oil on a test patch to see how it will look,the idea being that it will give it a "wet" look.

[lutonlagerlout]

when we get cement on staffordshire blues (cant be helped on wet days) we use hessian and WD40 to shine them up
brings them up like new

LLL