Originally posted by brickie in oz
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The remaining images are from this a.m. After looking at the videos, it appeared I made a number of mistakes in my first attempt in addition to adding too much water to the mix. I was only buttering one side of the bricks and not using enough mortar. I mixed up a small amount of mortar and tried to get to the consistency of "peanut butter." I hand mixed with the trowel but the mix acted like natural peanut butter with oil (in this case water) coming to the top. The mix would seem thick enough but as the water came out, when mixed back up it would be too thin. When I thought I had the correct consistency, I tried mortaring some of the brick cuttings. I buttered both sides and gently pressed together, using the trowel to remove some of the excess. After the mortar seemed to be setting, I used a wet rag to clean the surface of the first three joints but left the last with extra mortar on top. Looks like these have a pretty good chance of working.
If you look carefully at the last image, water can be seen pooling on top of the mortar. This was also occurring with the first three joints, with very thin watery mortar oozing out the edges of the joints. If the mortar was allowed to rest a minute of so, this would also occur to the mortar in the tray. Does this mean the mortar was still too wet or not mechanically mix enough? Or for that matter, is it normal.
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