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Vent: I was cutting bricks wrong for like a year and only found out because of a kid's toy
So I was doing a small patio job in my own town, just a simple herringbone pattern. I was cutting all the half bricks with my hammer and bolster, like I always do. It was fine, but I was going through a lot of blades and the edges were never super clean. My buddy's kid, maybe 8 years old, was watching me work from the back door. He comes out with one of those plastic toy tool sets and starts 'cutting' a piece of scrap wood with his little saw. He goes, 'You gotta go slow like this, see?' and he's making these tiny, careful back-and-forth motions. I laughed, but then it hit me. I was just whacking the chisel as hard as I could every time. I tried a lighter touch with more scoring passes on the next brick, and the cut was way cleaner with less waste. I mean, I felt like a total goof. Has anyone else had a basic technique thing they were doing wrong for way too long?
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the_ryan11d ago
My uncle taught me to lay tile and for two years I was mixing thinset way too thick. I saw a guy on a job site just adding water slowly until it was like peanut butter and my mind was blown. I was out there making cement basically, no wonder it was so hard to spread. Sometimes you just get stuck in a bad habit.
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