Watched an old-timer lay a herringbone pattern at a church job 10 years back

I was on a restoration project at St. Anne's in 2014, just helping with mortar. This guy Frank, must've been 70, laid out this herringbone pattern on the front steps without a single cut line. He just eyeballed it and tapped each brick with his trowel handle. I tried copying his method on my next job and messed up the whole corner. Had to rip it out and start over. Anyone else pick up a trick from watching someone older that turned out way harder than it looked?

3 comments

3 Comments

olivia_lopez9812d ago

That herringbone pattern is brutal, I feel your pain. I spent a whole weekend trying to match a pattern this old stonemason named Joe did on a fireplace in 2016 and I still have the crooked corner to prove it. You watch their hands and it looks like magic, but your own hands don't know what they're doing yet. It's humbling how fast you can go from thinking you've got it to staring at a pile of bricks you gotta pull out. Some moves just take years to build up, no shortcut for it.

nina_taylor12d ago

Old timers like Frank have a feel for the work that comes from decades of doing it... they never had the luxury of laser levels and calculators. I watched my grandfather lay a whole fieldstone wall with nothing but a string line and a spud bar, it looked effortless but the next time I tried it my wall was a wobbly mess. There's a real difference between seeing someone's hands move and actually having the muscle memory in your own fingers.

the_brian12d ago

Gotta push back on that a little. If experience was everything, we'd still be using slide rules and corded drills. The guys who can actually teach you that stuff are long gone or can't explain it, so you're just learning a romanticized version of a method that's slower and harder to repeat.