Tuck point like a pro!

hey how's it going i am going to teach the everyday average joe how to tuck point like a pro using this called a grout bag it's similar to an icing bag except it's a lot more heavy duty sometimes they're made of leather sometimes they have reinforced tips such as metal hard plastic sometimes if i have to stick the tip inside of the mortar joints i'll reinforce it with some heavy duty tape like gorilla tape or some duct tape or something like that anybody can do this is not hard i would be more than willing to come do it for you for a small fee so first thing we want to do one second so this is a chimney we've taken a four and a half inch angle grinder ground out all the mortar joints we need to go back at least three quarters of an inch that way we have plenty of room to put our fresh mortar in there you want to take a blower a brush i like to use a hose as long as there's no big giant gaps or any big holes in the mortar joints back there that water is going to get in uh chimneys are designed to take on a certain amount of water i've built these things for years from the ground up and uh on the rough end and down in the smoke shelf and all that good stuff on the inside it's designed to take a little bit of water on usually if you're having a leak on your chimney i'd say five times out of ten it's the flashing which is the metal at the bottom or it has to do with the crown at the top which is the concrete on top being cracked or broken up so i've ground out everything i've rinsed it out really well i've mixed up my mortar i like to use when i'm using a grout bag i like to do it two to one ratio or actually two and a half to one um if you mix it two and a half to one and uh you put it in your grout bag and you get ready to start going you can't squeeze it through the tip a couple things could be wrong your tip could be too small you can take a razor knife cut the tip a little bit bigger or most of the time if that's not the issue your mortar's got a little bit too much sand in it so uh i always take a dash extra mortar powder uh whatever type of mortar you're using and add it to it it makes it a little richer and makes it flow through the bag a little bit better a lot of people will tell you that this is completely wrong you should not do this but my experience i've been doing this for 26 years i've done this thousands of times you know if you read the books you go to school for it they're gonna tell you to do it in lifts a lift is basically a layer of mortar so if i have a three-quarter inch joint i'm gonna do three one-quarter inch lifts what i've noticed happens when you do that even though you wet your wall down with a sprayer or hose or anything before you go to a grout bag or tuck pointed in is that the first lift it uh the uh the existing mortar that we're gonna be tuck pointing up against sucks all the water out of the the new mortar instantly which is why they want you to do that in a way second lift kind of does the same thing in the third lift it just kind of slows the process down i've had many times have done this and had to go back over co-workers works where the lifts themselves were like separated from one another and it just didn't work out good so what i do is like i said i mix the mortar i like to add acryl 60 it's a bonding agent it's a mortar conditioner it's gonna it's basically like glue for mortar uh sometimes depending on the situation i may take you know straight across 60 in a cup with a chip like a two inch chip brush paint it in the joints kind of get that you know get that wet with that bonding agent and then tuck point it uh i found that's not a hundred necessary either just kind of slows down the process i'm all about trying to get stuff done quick sufficient and neat so what i do is uh i use i determine you know how sticky it's going to need to be you know things of that nature and i just add it straight to the water in the mortar before i go to mix it swish it up real good i use a uh a drill and a mortar paddle that's not near me at the moment but i'll show you that later on so now what i'm gonna do is just go ahead and wet down the mortar the existing mortar joints with a sprayer just you just need enough to wet it down as you can see here i've grout bagged some in already so you know this is a process once you once you start to put this in it's a game of jumping back and forth you know i'm gonna grout bag a section in i'm gonna keep track of you know how hard that's getting how fast that's setting up i may missed it with the sprayer to kind of keep it from prematurely setting up because sometimes it can crack on you which isn't good either because that what happens is through the winter um if you're from the midwest or anywhere that's cold i'm from cincinnati so we get fairly cold winters um you know you get a hairline crack in your mortar joint or you get some separation from the brick to the new mortar it creates a hairline crack you know it snows it rains sunshine comes out and uh it's called the freezing thawing process so basically if it snows on this chimney at night and there's a ledge with a crack in it it's going to snow in the morning over this way when the sun rises up in the east it's going to melt the snow the snow's going to turn into water obviously it's going to go in the crack and then over that night it's going to re-freeze again and if you've ever made ice before which i'm sure everyone has you know that it expands when it freezes water can be a pretty cruel uh competitor out here so you know that process happening over and over and over and over again it's just it just destroys your mortar joints so with that being said i'm gonna take my grout bag i've already cut my tip before i use these i like to take my uh sprayer kind of mist it a little bit i don't want you know water pouring out of it or anything so it's gonna go through my tarp that i have laid down on my chimney to keep the roof clean it's going to make it all messy and it's going to uh make it a lot more difficult when i go to acid wash this thing later on which i'll talk about in a little while so what i do is i take the grout bag usually find the seam there's a seam right here and i'll take it and i'll fold it over because my goal is to keep this bag clean because if i'm not i'm squeezing it i'm moving around i'm turning it and then the next thing you know i'm going to do something and i put my hand on the brick wall and i'm smearing it and again i'm slowing down the process because i'm dirtying up brick that i don't need to be dirtying up so again i find the seam and i'll fold it over i usually leave this end up i'm pretty good aim with my my trial getting in there i like to use something small this is a duckbill trowel uh some people use margin trial some people use full-size brick trowels you know just take your mud make sure that it's uh that it's fairly loose or else it's not going to uh flow through the grout bag like you want it to and you're just going to get frustrated as all get out once another thing when you go to mix your mortar you want to make sure there's no uh like pea gravel or mulch or or anything of that nature chunky that can be in your sand or maybe if you bought a bag of mortar and you let it get wet and has some of the mortar powder is set up and created hard chunks in it uh this this is no good for a grout bag you want to you want to stay away from anything that can clog that tip up not you know usually what happens is you go to fill it up i fill mine up pretty pretty full so i get a lot out of one bag but um someone who's new with this they're going to want to kind of maybe just maybe throw in like a scoop and a half or maybe two scoops so that they're only dealing with maybe this much of the bag that way you can get your uh your control and stuff down with the bag so you know i take this again with the seam i don't know why it just seems to work the best that way when you fold it over with the seam take a mortar make sure it's loose so i'll just take the trifold mortar just throw it in the bag try my hardest to keep the outside of this bag clean probably doesn't help that i'm a neat freak so you know here we got the mortar sitting in this part of the bag what i like to do is kind of grab it and uh i'm gonna you know shake it and and kind of jerk it so that everything falls down when that happens every single time mortar is gonna splash back up in your face so when i do it i kind of turn my head and just do a real quick one of those so if you can see the mortar is all kind of condensed down in the bottom this is uh about two and a half scoops it's about a little more than half the bag so if it's too loose obviously it's going to run out of the end um if it's too hard it's not going to come out of the end so i'll just take it like this kind of just however you want to fold it up i'm kind of like going like this to get the air out and i'm going to turn it a little bit this process is basically a game of i'm going to squeeze with this hand and i'm going to kind of control it with this hand i need to keep this bag as tight as humanly possible because if not it's not going to squeeze out right and i can kind of show you here how it comes out when you squeeze it you're just going to squeeze it out like that you're going to want to control it though and you always want to keep this tight so i'm constantly going to see me constantly shaking it shake it down let everything drop gravity is going to do its job shake it down squeeze shake it down squeeze so on and so forth i will tell you i've taught a lot of people how to do this some people never get it some people get it right away well actually i'll take that back no one ever gets this right away so i'm going to wet these down i kind of want to get them pretty thoroughly thoroughly wet especially if you're in the sun or if you're in like a really hot climate or if you have lots of wind you really want to make sure that that mortar on the inside's wet that existing mortar because if not you're just going to put new mortar in there it's going to dry way too fast it's going to crack away and it's not going to be any good uh i always have a rag near me because i want to get rid of any any water droplets i don't know if you can see this on a video because this is going to cause a big mess later so i just like real gently wipe the excess water off the face of the brick i'm gonna shake my bag down twist it super tight and then i cut my tip a little bit bigger than most and i cut it on a slight angle it's i mean it's not much i don't know if you can see that and uh depending on how big your mortar joint is this one here i can stick my finger in this one i can't get it in you know these this one's huge i can easily get the tip in there but on some of these other tighter ones like this one i can't really get it in there without smearing it all over the the face of the brick you know these are head joints h-e-a-d these are bed joints bed i like to do my bed joints first because what i notice happens is when i'm squeezing this along it likes to fall down into the head joints so if i do that first it halfway fills my heads up head joint up for me so i have less work to do in a little while you want to make sure you go systematically at this you don't want to do a little here a little there a little up here a little over there because this is all going to be drying out you know a lot quicker than i prefer but it is what it is so i'm gonna start you can uh these tips you can you can kind of squeeze them down that's another reason i cut mine big if i have a tight head joint i can kind of squeeze that tip down and i can squeeze that out thinner to get into that if if i have a big one i'll just leave it open i'll squeeze it out and it'll be bigger so i'm gonna go ahead and show you how i fill a couple of these up hopefully you can see it on the video and maybe sometime in the future might be able to do some of your own tough points it's really not that hard once you get the hang of it so i'd like to take my tip and keep it away from me like the longer end of the slant cut on the tip of the grout bag that because if if i don't then that when i go to drag it it'll it'll want to plow itself and that means that the mortar is going to spill up over the edge of the top and the bottom brick so again i'm going to squeeze i'm just going to kind of go slow to show you and i'm kind of this is a game of tr uh transferring the mortar from my right hand do my left hand my right hand i'm right-handed is going to be where i get most of uh the pressure from that's where in my left hand i'm going to kind of i don't know if you can see i'm kind of squeezed a little bit that's where i'm going to get my control from so these are my bed joints again this one's a little bit tighter so i'm going to squeeze that tip get it in there see how it's feeling uh you can't see that on my video and don't worry like you're gonna make a mess doing this i guarantee it i promise you but that's what the acids for later on so i'm gonna do you know a little bit of these i'm going a little quicker i don't want the stuff drying out on me too bad again don't worry about if you get some on the brick they make an acid i like to use vanatrol some people use sure clean 600 some people use muratic acid i'd suggest staying away from the muratic i don't know if you can see where that mortar just fell down it like pretty much filled that head joint up for me so cutting down on my workload a little bit two birds one stone let me go through and just squeeze some for you and when i'm done i'm i'm shaking it i'm letting gravity do its thing i'm twisting it tight enough to where it's not spilling out the end but tight enough to where i'll be able to squeeze it out eventually if you do this enough you get pretty quick at it this chimney here is probably on the tall end it's it's probably eight or nine foot tall on the short end it's about five five and a half foot tall and it's probably about six foot wide with if i wasn't making a video i could probably have this thing shot in join it out and everything in probably about two three hours so yeah i'm squeezing this in as the bag obviously gets emptier it's going to get a little harder to squeeze it once you get down to where you just have a little bit in the tip i mean there's really not a whole lot to play with there so usually what i do i'll usually have a little bit more in it than this that's when i'll drop back and i'll do my head joints because i can have a lot more control when there's less uh mortar in the bag so these obviously you want to start from the bottom up because if you start from the top down it's just going to want to fall out so i start from the bottom up i'm going to drag it up against that bed joint mortar so that it doesn't fall back out because sometimes you'll notice when you go to squeeze it up and you don't connect it with that top joint it'll just roll right back out on you see this one here i don't can't see it on camera or not but it's really tight so i'm pinching that that tip of that i'm able to get that mortar in there a little bit better i'm going to do one more round squeezing the bag and then i'm going to show you what the next step is in the process so so i got my bag full again it's all kind of in this area it's not down here yet much of it remember to move your face because when you shake this down it's going to spray up at you so i move it over shake it drop it maybe a couple times you can see when i do that some of the mortar falls out that's where you know like you're getting most of that air out of there you don't really want you want to try to avoid that so when i go to close this up i'm kind of working it right here it is as i'm squeezing here i'm working some of that air out of the top and then i'm gonna get that twist i don't know why these things always remind me of a candy corn kinda funny so this is twisted a couple times the way i hold it is with my index finger on my thumb like that and then i put the rest of my hand around here and then this part of my hand right here is going to hold that twist closed so that way i can use actually use my thumb and all four fingers to kind of apply that pressure because this will bother your wrist if you have any wrists i was in an accident and broke both of them and broke both of my hands so but i've been doing this for so long my hands are so built up just used to it i guess again i'm gonna get that wet a little bit i'm in the shade right now so i'm kind of kind of spoiled at the moment it's about 90 something degrees out right now in the middle of july i work full-time for a company hopefully be a foreman here soon it's looking that way and then i started my own business called handcraft restoration last about a year ago just doing side jobs here and there and uh really took off so that's awesome trying to build something for my family and my son right now i work eight hours a day at my day job and honestly most nights i work till about dark i get off at two last night i worked till uh 10 30. i was loading up my vehicle and at the it was dark outside all right bags tight hand is how i showed you to hold it just kind of like my palm is holding that twist closed i'm gonna apply the pressure with this whole hand this is gonna take some practice and getting used to it's not easy i definitely make it look way easier than it is it's because i've been doing it for so long my tip that i've cut is facing away from me the opposite way that i'm dragging i'm gonna stick the tip inside the joint and i'm just gonna apply pressure with my right hand which is the one on the back and i'm going to kind of control it with my left hand i'm just going to make sure i bring that mortar out you know a little bit past the brick they call it uh leaving it proud that means there's more mortar there than you need because the next step in the process is going to be taking a tuck pointer and kind of pushing this stuff in making sure it gets all the way back i'm pretty good about squeezing it all the way back so i don't have to do much of that in this twist that i'm doing i don't know if you can see it or not it kind of comes natural over time squeezing squeezing squeezing i mean i can get a pretty good line off of just one squeeze because i'm i know how to transfer it and everything in inside the bag get the bag tight again holding it tip away sometimes you might have to twist it around a couple times to achieve that stick it in the joint squeeze if you're close to eye level to be a little better because you can tell if there's uh any low spots like that but the next stage in the process which is taking the tuck pointer making sure you smash it in there real good we're gonna another reason we leave this proud is so that we have all the mortar on the wall that we need to fill those holes so i don't have to go tracking down all kinds of other tools a big trial to put mud on or whatever because i can just take my tuck pointer which is when i cut down i love them cut down it's a lot more you can be a lot more nimble with them and you can really get into tight spaces better versus a regular size tuck pointer these are obviously longer they get further back they reach longer but i'm telling you cut your tuck pointers down a little bit so squeeze some more of this in there's a low spot right here so i can take my bag since i see it and i'm here just dab a little bit on there again stick it in there squeeze it make sure that it's kind of coming out you don't want it it's always better to have a little bit too much than not enough just speeds the process up i'm all about trying to get things done quick and neatly that's a huge thing with me it's hard to find guys that are to have all those qualities so i just squeeze these in i have a little bit left in the bag i'm going to go ahead and hit these head joints just so i can kind of keep everything uniformed i got it all over see it's on the brick no big deal acid's going to take that off after a few days after this sets up squeeze them in make sure you drag that mortar up against that bed joint keep it stick in there don't worry about being sloppy i'm actually being a little sloppy right now got a low head joint i got a little bit left in the bag so i'm gonna go ahead and take that and put it in there save me a step later on check to make every make sure you didn't miss anything in this area that you're working in i missed the head joint here so i'm to put that in there missed a couple here start jumping around a little bit all right so i'm pretty well got all that filled in normally i would kind of do it in columns you know maybe three foot or so and i would do like the whole chimney then i would move over and maybe do the another section on this one my my goal was to do it in halves so i was going to do half the chimney and then half the chimney as i go up so next step in the process we're going to take a tuck pointer right now i only have my my skinny ones near me these things come in all different widths that's your width they're not very thick as you can see so what i'm going to do i don't want to mess with the stuff that i just put in that's way too wet that's that's going to spew right out um so i'm going to go down here where i was working before and i'm going to just kind of start smashing this stuff in a little bit this you know people they will uh take way too long on this process trying to perfect it uh you know if you get to a spot let me see where there may be a little low spot like right here come up here where you just you just squeezed and got some fresh still wet mortar and you can take that and just put it in there obviously if you come down here where you squeezed it earlier it's going to be too hard it's just going to crumble so i'm gonna like i said earlier you got all the mud on the wall that you need to achieve this as long as you when you squeeze that mortar in with the grout bag you um squeeze it in flush so this is simple i'm just going to go through and kind of smash these all down and i'm going to scrape it like that uh there's a variety of different types of finishes for this different we call them joints joiners this one here it's uh i call it a skate joint you can find these in like specialty shops you're not going to find them at home depot or anything like that go to a supply yard or something [Music] usually what i like to do is hit all my head joints in order you know you can go down to up up the down left to right whatever you want to do just trying to be sufficient make sure i don't miss anything again if i see any holes like that one there i'm going to get some fresh mortar up here that's not quite hard yet well where to go here it is kind of fill that in a little bit do all my head joints this does not have to be pretty at all you just want to make sure that there's not a big space behind there that these are really full so after i get all these i'm gonna do the bed joints a lot of times you can just cut it but if it if you didn't get it full you're gonna have an issue later when you go to join it out on with any type of joiner that you use i'm gonna use my smaller tuck pointer because it's it's easier to handle so yeah i'm just smashing this stuff down kind of getting a little bit the excess off looking for low spots things of that nature if this you're going to want to do small sections at first because this stuff's going to get away from you brick are extremely dry nature this stuff i just squeezed in about i don't know 20 minutes ago or so and it's already a little harder than i like it to be i got a hole right there you can see i need to get some fresh mortar put it in there that's when i just i don't bother getting a grout bag back out cause that's a whole process in itself filling that thing back up i just go up to my my area where i just squeezed it get some of the mortar that's more than likely still soft throw it in there move on i'm jumping all over the place it doesn't like me this like does not have to be pretty at all the reason why sometimes it does depending you know i'm on a chimney in the center of a roof i mean you can kind of see this chimney from the backyard not that i'm trying to uh get anything over on my customers but it's just not that important because it's going to look really good when we acid wash the whole chimney a few days from now kind of double check everything [Music] this is just going to be a game of jumping around like i said earlier make sure this thing is still recording never this my first video i think i'm doing pretty good i teach a lot of guys how to do a lot of stuff i really enjoy it i feel like i'm good at it the work and get teaching stuff off there um in my business i do most i don't i don't like to do new masonry anymore i do a lot more than masonry caulking patching concrete and he's painting all kinds of stuff but mason's what i've been for 26 years so just for time's sake piece of brick broke off no big deal adds character basically getting any of that excess off you can use your tuck pointer you can get a trowel anything that's kind of sharp just to kind of drag that along get it off there now normally what i would do is i grout back i wet it i grout bag it in let it sit for a little bit get to where it's about i don't know where you could almost see your thumb print i guess when you push on it like that and then you take your tough point you're going to do all this let it sit again for a little bit maybe mist it a couple times to keep it from drying prematurely and then on this particular chimney we're going to be wire brushing it which in my opinion is genius because not only are you recessing the brick with the wire brush as long as you can control it pretty good you're cleaning the brick bottom all right i'm gonna quit playing with that this video is getting long all right so basically as you can see it's all just kind of haphazardly smushed in there nothing major this kind of got away from me a little bit i was lollygagging talking too much so i'm going to go ahead and wire brush it like i just said though normally you would uh let that sit a little bit but it's pretty dry all right let's see if i can set this down here hopefully i can find somebody that can edit these things this wire brush is beat up but it still works so you're just going to take your wire brush you kind of want to do this lightly i like to do my uh head joints first on this i mean it's just personal preference for me so i'm just take the wire brush just kind of lightly scrape that out you want to the two magic words in restoration business is uh match existing so whatever the rest of the house looks like that's what we're trying to mimic i could take my skate joint as i call it and uh make this all nice and even same depth it's adjustable so you can make it any depth that you want but this is faster so as you can see this is not very involved kind of go through i want to make sure that these edges are just have a little bit of a reveal on them not too much because when it snows this winter or rains really hard i don't want anything finding its way in there so normally what i do is after i do all this a couple days usually they say about three days you can acid wash it i use my favorites vanatrol i use it just you just mix it with water i like a four to one ratio so that's four cups water one cup vanatrol and as you can see this is kind of cleaning the brick also any any smears that i may have gotten on there i'm knocking all that loose mortar off and that way all i have left to deal with are these little stains and that stuff will get eaten right off by that acid now this thing is i'm sure you can probably tell in the video it has brush lines in it i don't want that so after i kind of do my head joints like that make sure it's revealed make sure they're relatively close to the same depth i'm gonna leave that go for a minute i usually take this and then i just run it this way call it cross hatching kind of as you can see see there's there's marks in there left by the brush kind of kind of takes them out a little bit maybe go up and down back and forth [Music] see that little hole and make sure i fill stuff like that and you can usually just stick your finger in there and smash it in there a little bit so i could sit here and play with this for a long time but i do want to show you about corners real quick this is a huge pet peeve of mine so this backs been done already this is the narrow side of the chimney oh

Channel: Patrick Gifford

Views: 18,122

Rating: 4.6123347 out of 5

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Id: gyJ-H3yT1-g

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020