Recycling a brick wall

[Lobster]

As I need to demolish one small brick wall and build another one, I thought it would be an idea to re-use the bricks, for aesthetic reasons, since they are the same age and type as the wall they will butt up against.

Never done this before, but boy am I making heavy weather of it! The bits of wall I'm demolishing are "tall and thin", keyed in to the adjacent wall at 90 deg. I've started taking it down brick by brick, using hammer and chisel plus wrecking bar; however it's taking a l-o-n-g time, is hard work, I've damaged quite a few in the process, and the salvaged bricks are still going to need cleaning up for re-use. Below the hard surface pointing, the old mortar is actually relatively powdery; even so...

Anyway, just wondering if there's a better way of doing this that I don't know about. Should I be running along the joints with an angle grinder first? (don't fancy that much). Also, what's the best way of cleaning off the old mortar?

Basically I need to make a decision now whether I'm going to proceed with this, or substitute a sledge-hammer, skip, and half a pallet of new bricks!

Thanks David

[Cicero]

=================================== When I did this a long time ago I was advised that a small hand axe is the best tool for removing the old mortar once the wall is demolished. Surprisingly, it worked well although it was a bit tedious! The axe was OK too after some serious re-grinding.

Cic.

[Mary Fisher]

We use a brick hammer.

Persevere, you'll be pleased with yourself once it's done!

Mary

[[news]]

I use a scutch hammer with the appropriate comb. learned by spending a whole lifetime (well, half a summer when I was 16) cleaning a demolished warehouse worth of bricks and stacking the buggers on pallets "properly" on pain of death (loss of a days pay)

RT

[Mary Fisher]

LOL! When you're sixteen half a summer feels like a lifetime :-)

No 1 son and Spouse demolished a brick housing for a church boiler, one of these enormous things which would serve a large stately home. Because they're both tight the bricks were roughly cleaned, stacked into our estate, taken to son's house and re-stacked in his garden. Very many times.

He built a garage with them last year - after getting his three sons to de-mortar them. Excellent experience for them :-)

Mary

RT

[Johan]

Buy a cheap Ferm SDS drill + set of bits from screwfix, use the chisel in the hammer setting. Worked very well for me when I cleaned up a couple of hundred bricks for our extension. Much less damage to the bricks than when I tried it with a chisel and hammer.

Johan

[bigcat]

reasons,

Below

an SDS will make this 10x faster and 10x easier.

Make sure your chosen SDS will work in all 3 modes: drill, hammer drill, and chisel. Ensure it has a chisel lock, and weighs 2.2kg not an arm bending 5kg. IOW get a Bosch or better, not a cheaparse one.

NT

[Mark]

Now you know why reclaimed bricks cost more than new ones. If thin means it's a single brick wall, As others have said attack it with an SDS drill. If its 9in you'll end up breaking lots so might just as well use a sledge hammer, or hire a breaker.

[Rob Morley]

I've found that a log splitting wedge made a pretty good job of taking bricks off when the mortar in the middle was soft - you can just lie it on the mortar bed and swing at it with a lump hammer. A bricky's hammer is pretty good for taking off the rest of the mortar.

[Chris Bacon]

Push the wall over if you can. Use a 4" bolster chisel and a light hammer, 1LB's enough. Put bricks in turn on a bag of sand, or similar, with some thick rag over bag. Lime mortar will just scrape off with a chopping motion of the bolster, which you can hold in your hand. If hard mortar is stuck on, place the edge of the bolster where it joins the brick, and give it a sharp tap in towards the middle of the top brick face, or frog, to prevent the brick "breaking out" if you go the other way. The faces don't nead to be perfectly clean, as long as there's enough room for a new bed between the bricks. Each one is worth about 25p, maybe more if they're "specials".

[Lobster]

Thanks for all the replies. Decided to try the SDS drill route - hadn't thought of that I must say, had decided that it would just smash the bricks to bits. However, it did a great job - the SDS action [1] was enough just to crack the mortar bonds to free up the bricks.

Haven't tried cleaning the bricks yet - that's for another day.

Thanks David

[1] Unfortunately I do have a major cheaparse SDS machine (the dreaded Screwfix Ferm beast) so my arms are well and truly bent today! In fact afterwards I used it to rip up an old concrete floor slab, thinking that with a bit of luck that it might finally kill it off so I can justify buying a nice new Bosch, but the the bloody thing just keeps on going and going...!

[Biff]

...and when you rebuild the wall make sure you use lime mortar. No Ordinary Portland Cement at all. The when your grandchildren want to move the wall and reuse the bricks again they will have an easy life. (Along with many other reasons for using lime not cement.)