Paul wrote:
snip
To my question: I'm looking to mortar in a couple of bricks and
repoint some of the joints. I've heard that for extremely old brick
type O mortar should be used. However, this is a load-bearing wall
that won't encounter any weathering issues - should I use type N
instead?

You want to use weaker mortar for older bricks becuase you run into
trouble if the mortar is harder than the brick. Since this is an indoor
wall, use the softest mortar available, since it's the weather that does
in mortar. Don't worry abou the strength: for one thing mortar strength
contributes nothing to the overall strength of a wall and for the other
thing: the wall was doing it's job just fine with the bricks gone, wasn't
it?

I'm not worried about color matching, the patched area is not going to
be one of the exposed areas. I am concerned about load, as I am going
to be cutting a doorway into the brick wall and putting a header in,
so the patched areas will experience somewhat increased load.

If your design depends on the mortar to hold up, you've done something
wrong. Historically, mortar was nothing more than three parts sand to one
part lime: no cement whatsover, and it held huge loads just fine.



John
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