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Mike's mortar recipe

T

TrimTheKing

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Hi Mike

I recall you mentioned a lengthy process of research into light coloured and and cement mixtures to get to your final pointing colour. Any chance you fancy sharing your findings and if there's a particular sand name/type I need to be looking for, and am I remembering correctly when you said you can get, or used, a white cement?

My main house is a very pale, almost lime mortar colour which I want to try and replicate for the workshop and looking to leverage as much of your research as possible to save me some time and searching for terms I don't know I need to search for…

Cheers
Mark
 
Hi Mark.

The whole idea of using white cement for a mortar is to try to replicate the look of lime mortar. I even tried using sharp sand, as they did in the old days with lime mortar (have a close look, you'll see some really large grains of sand in your original mortar)........but it didn't work well. So, my mixture is 6:1:1/2 (white builder's sand: white cement: NHL 3.5 lime). If your bricks are quite soft, you might adjust that to 7:1:1/2

The really important thing when you have a striking, high contrast mortar like this is to "gauge" it each time, not to mix it by counting shovelfuls. So, get a selection of buckets, paint tins etc, and work out an exact volume..........such as six paint tins equals one bucketful. Mark these out, write the mixture in foot high letters on a card (well, you know what I mean), and don't let anyone cut any corners with mixing, because it will show in the mortar colour. Don't use washing up liquid as a plasticiser (it causes efflourescence through its high salt content), but buy a proprietry admix.

When buying sand, buy the whitest sand you can find, and buy all you are going to need (and more) in one go. Sand varies in colour even from the same quarry, so do what you can to make sure your sand is the same colour throughout the bricklaying exercise. I go to the trouble of having separate bags of sand for blocklaying as compared to bricklaying, so that I don't accidentally run out of bricklaying sand.
 
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