How to Make Bricks | This Old House

[Music] the brick that we're using today is called a City Hall paver made by a company just outside of Boston the same way for centuries no matter where you go in Boston you look at the sidewalks you look at the building's a brick veneer this is the brick you're gonna see so here we are we're down at the factory 120 years old that's been run by the same family for four generations I'm here with Lincoln Andrews hey Lincoln hi mark explain a little bit about the brick for me absolutely it's used to wrote New England from Maine all the way down to Connecticut Wow but some of the most prestigious locations there are such as the Freedom Trail Boston City Hall Beacon Hill Harvard Yard Martha's Vineyard Indian Tucket wow what makes this brick so great for the New England area is the indigenous clay and the way that we process it if you look at it mark you'll see that it's not perfectly square and there's slate non-uniformities to it which I'm sure you're familiar with that's my favorite part of the brick actually yeah exactly so what happens is that because the brick are not perfectly square when you lay them out in a pavement you'll see an entire colonial pavement rather than one individually perfect brick Wow great that's what makes this brick so unique would you like to tell the brick I made I would love it like a mess let's go all right this is where the process begins a junk truck comes in where the raw material dumps the clay into this machine called a pug mill okay so a pug mill what's that - is it shipped a big mixer yes exactly the pug mill takes this rock clay oh yeah kind of wet right there Lincoln exactly it's wet and it's kind of gritty yeah when it starts to mix the clay and they can imagine this so they become much more smooth okay okay how many brick can I get out of this load right here 5,000 Brooklyn 5,000 so we make 10,000 Birkenau we're on the Frick machine wow that's great so this is the brick machine it's pretty simple what it does it takes that mixed-up play and it presses it down into a mold the mold is then pushed out it leaves an ice-cream stripe on the play this is a freshly molded brick pick it up oh boy I don't think I can lay that like it's nothing more than a foreign piece of mud at this point it's really wet in fact now we have to dry it which is gonna bring us over to our next step of the process go free so then we bring the bricks and we push them into the brick dryer okay and these bricks now are already dried right they've been cycled for about 22 hours and they just finishing up Wow so what's what's its what am I in right now baby you're in about 200 degrees or so why it's called a dryer it's really not that hot right but we have taken one pound of water out of every single brick so this is still a lot bigger than what I usually lay that's exactly right but then when we bring the brick into the kiln it's going to become even smaller now we're going to our brick kiln it's round and has a dome shaped ceiling so we call it a beehive kiln now we fit 85,000 brick inside just a 85,000 brick unbelievable what could you do with eighty-five thousand grit Lincoln I could fill the school with a to go so we're here to kill now that is just finished firing for five days at 2,000 degrees we're going to pop the lid off the kiln and stop to cool and cool it down okay we're gonna roll up the sleeve lift the dome cover off of the kiln which Tim is going to do right now all right yep it's a dome tremor wait till you see inside unreal look at those bricks a 1950 Gries Fahrenheit we dropped the sleeves down so we can suck the heat and bring it over to the dryer to dry the brick so it's not wasted Wow unreal how long is it gonna take us to be able to use the brick three days from nineteen hundred and fifty degrees down to 120 degrees when we can unload the kiln and send them to the packaging machine mark these are fired brick that have come out of the kiln okay oh yeah that's a lot cooler so Lincoln when I'm laying the brick on a jobsite all we do is we take it right off and read into the wall and I know there's a blend here that's exactly right we saw it for size and color and also mixture so if you notice mark we have a blend here we have 85% of these red brick right here to 15% of those Browns to black we sort them together and then the bricks are gonna be scrapped into the cube and ready to go to the jobsite all right well I need one more cube on the job in Arlington but I wanted to say thank you for the tour is outstanding any time all right thanks for watching this old house has gotten a video for just about every home-improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you'd like me to see click on the subscribe button make sure that you get our newest videos writing your feed

Channel: This Old House

Views: 77,738

Rating: 4.9278197 out of 5

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Mark McCullough, bricks, masonry, Arlington Arts & Crafts, Season 38, 4-6 minutes

Id: mtQ5bc-R99I

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020