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Old timer told me to stop buttering my bricks and it fixed my corner joints
I was laying a retaining wall last month in St. Paul and this guy with 40 years in the trade watched me for two minutes. He said I was putting way too much mortar on the face of every brick and that was why my corners kept dropping. I cut my mortar bed back by half and suddenly my plumb lines actually stayed straight. Anyone else have that problem early on where you think more mud equals more strength?
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cameron_palmer11h ago
More mortar just means more mess, not more strength.
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charliew999h ago
...and the other thing nobody talks about is how extra mortar changes how the brick dries. You end up with different moisture levels across the wall and that's what really screws up your corners over time, not just the initial slump. The old guys figured that out by watching failures happen slow, not fast. They saw that a thin consistent bed lets everything cure at the same rate and that keeps your lines true way better than piling it on ever could. It's like they learned from mistakes without needing a textbook to tell them why.
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