On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:53:30 -0700, Harry K
wrote:

Mortar is not a
'glue'.

The guys who buillt my house got mortar over a lot of the bricks, and
extra mortar at the edges of where it was supposed to be also.

I got loads of it off with a box cutter with the blade in sideways**
so it was a scraper. This worked better than a dedicated single-blade
razor scraper, because the blades didn't break anywhere near as often.

You're right that the extra mortar barely stuck to the bricks and the
hard part was where it was attached to more mortar, and even that part
wasn't very strong.

**There are two designs for the simple two piece, very flat box
cutter. Only one design can be used also as scrapers. You can tell
by the inner piece. It holds the razor at one end as a box cutter,
and at the other end, the two pieces of metal when viewed from the
side form a sharply pointed triangle, like a thumb and forefinger
holding something