Preventing staining around mortar joints

[joycem]

I am having a new patio of rigid paving using clay pavers with mortar joints. One of the contractors I have asked to quote has suggested that mortar staining can be prevented by painting linseed oil around the edge of the pavers.

Is this a common practice? Will it work? Will it change the look of the pavers when dry or wet?

Thanks for your thoughts.

[lutonlagerlout]

i have heard of it used the same way as wd40 to prevent mortar staining
I would of guessed it was easier to use experienced contractors who will be very careful
its not a totally bad idea IMHO
LLL

[Pablo]

Would it not be best to slurry point paving like that or use a resin based product. I've heard of the oil thing but I'm sceptical if it runs down the block then the mortar won't bond with it. A skillful contractor should have no problem pointing that without staining. Even better if they use a pointing gun.

[lutonlagerlout]

on very hard clay pavers or engineering bricks some staining is inevitable due to the non porosity of the material
we only use the wd40 a couple of hours later to buff it up
LLL

[Tony McC]

Many clay pavers are drag-faced and so slurry-jointing with a cement mortar is often disastrous, requiring recourse to the owld hydrochloric acid to eliminate the inevitable haze. The resin slurries are cleaner, but more expensive.

However, LLL's original point about using experienced contractors is the key. There are very few paving teams with genuine experience in laying rigid brick pavements, and those that do exist tend to come from a brick-laying background, rather than groundworks or streetmasonry. They can work fast and *clean* with virtually no staining and no need for oils, masking or retro-cleaning.

We did a job 20-odd years ago where we buttered the joints with a standard bricklaying consistency mortar and then brushed in a semi-dry mix within 20 minutes and tooled it in-situ to fill the joint and avoid staining the brickwork. It was reasonably successful at the time, and when I looked at it earlier this year, you would never be able to tell how we'd done it, but it relied on the bricks (and the weather) being dry. Luckily, it was a summertime job: if it had been later in the year, I think we might have struggled.

[London Stone Paving]

LLL

Why do blue engineering bricks stain so badly? Surely if there not porous then they should stain less.

But it also reminds me of some of our hard sandstones. If you do manage to get them stained it is an absolute nightmare to shift

[lutonlagerlout]

the main reason they stain is that if the mortar is in anyway wet as you lay the brick the water runs out of the mortar
also the bricks are dark blue so it stands out more
LLL