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Page 2
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| 18th century village house. Grade has gone up
and sills are rotted. |
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Brick
18th and early 19th century bricks were hand made locally, if not on site.
In New England, bricks were typically 7 to 8 inches long, 1 1/2 to 2 inches high and 4 inches wide.
They were thinner than modern brick, which are typically 2 5/8 inches high.
Bricks were not perfectly copacetic as are today’s industrially produced wire cut brick, but had a rather wide range of unique shapes and colors.
With their shapeliness and no-two-bricks-alike qualities, they resembled the product of the potter’s kiln.
They had a soft beauty that contemporary large-scale manufacturers cannot match.
Even if bricks of modern manufacture are sawn or special ordered to size, their monotonous flatness stands out as a glaring patch in any restoration. |
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18th century village house showing original stones
“sunken” below grade. |
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Water blows out bulkhead wall. Lintel
drops. Wall sags. |
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The brick making process began with wet clay hand pushed into wooden molds. The molded bricks were air dried, then stacked into some variety of dome shape to form a kiln.
A roaring wood fire in the kiln fired the brick. Bricks nearest the fire were the hardest and least porous.
These “hard fi red” brick were carefully selected and sold at a premium as “face brick”. Face brick were hard enough to take the New England winter.
Softer firedbrick were used where there was no weather exposure, for interior chimneys, basement walls etc.
18th century builders specified hard burned brick for facings (exteriors) and soft “Salmon brick”, so called for their light orange color, for interior partition walls.
In our highly quantified world of ASTM standards, these characteristics of hard and soft brick are lost knowledge. A wrecking ball knocks down an old factory building. The bricks are gathered, the soft mixed with the hard, palletized, and sold under the label “used brick”.
As indiscriminately as they are sold, so they are laid, the soft mixed with the hard. The soft bricks absorb rainwater, freeze, and spall away.
Rules to follow:
• Save and reuse original materials when in good condition. The addition of a garage door out back might generate several hundred original face bricks that might be used later to repair a facade.
• The old brick had a top side and a bottom. The top side of the wooden mold was open to the air and this side was fi nished flatter. Lay this side up.
The side that was down against the bottom of the wooden mold was rougher and slightly convex. Lay this side down.
This top/bottom placement or misplacement can affect the finished brickwork. Instead of a smooth vertical corner or jamb, laying the bricks upside or mixed can give even originals a herky jerky look. |
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| Left to right: hand made 18th century brick, restoration brick, new wire cut brick. |
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• Be aware that persons with a discerning eye for valuable historic building parts will rarely seek employment in the demolition trade.
• Never sandblast brick in an attempt to clean it. Blast with baking soda which is less abrasive.
• Standard brick ties are made for tying a veneer wall to wooden or metal studs or a concrete wall. When relaying a brick face wall that has separated from the wythe (wall) behind it use a spiral type helix type tie. These are sometimes called restoration ties.
• Allow time in the planning process to source out matching brick. If substituting new restoration brick, use brick that is manufactured in the old way, not just new brick that has been decorated to look “antique”.
Yes, there are companies that still press clay into wooden molds as in the old days. They produce beautiful brick that meet modern specs but match antique brick perfectly. They can also do a great job of custom matching site specific original brick.
Allow time in planning. These companies may not be as fast with an order, but the results cannot be compared with off the shelf brick. Three companies that make these brick are Vermont Brick, Morin Brick in Maine, and Old Carolina Brick in North Carolina. |
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