If you are a brick-laying specialist, you would do anything you can to improve your technique. No one is perfect and no matter how good you think you are at something, you can always improve on your skills. It could be speed, the appearance of your final project or the durability of your work. Here are some tips to help you improve your technique as a bricklayer.

Set up your mortar boards and brick stacks in an efficient place

You need to avoid making super long stacks of bricks. You should try to pile your bricks about three feet long and place a mortar board in between the stacks. Keep a three feet lane between your stacks and the wall. This will allow enough room for doing your work comfortably but it also means everything. Your bricks and mortar are within one step or two. Now you will have saved time.

Position yourself properly

It is amazing how a lot of new apprentices try to lay bricks as they face the wall while laying. You should start parallel to the wall and keep your trowel hand outward. This gives you the sight you need for placing bricks along your string line and it also means that you do not need to turn one hundred and eighty degrees to pick up new bricks.

Furrow the mortar bed correctly

Running your trowel through the bed creating a cavity in the middle is known as furrowing. During your bricklaying project, there are two main ways to do this. The first way is to keep your trowel in line with your bricks, lifting it over your line and pressing down into it while the second involves holding the trowel perpendicular to your bricks and coming underneath your string line and using your trowel to furrow from the side. The latter is the fastest way to do this and also makes it easier for you to keep the trowel off the string line.

Loading your trowel and picking up bricks

You should make an effort to pick up a new brick the way that it is laid on the wall.  This will save you the time of spinning your brick. Some bricklayers load their trowel with excess mortar cut off from the last brick they laid.

This works well with wider bricks but will not work great with thinner bricks. At best, it will leave enough mortar for only one edge of the brick. Sometimes the picking and dripping method can work well because it involves pressing your brick into the un-farrowed bed and squeezing your mortar up into your perp joints. There is no need of buttering the brick but you will create large snots at the backside of your wall and you can end up filling the cavity with wasted mortar.

Another good laying technique for a bricklaying specialist is known as no look grab. This technique involves picking up a brick with one hand and loading your trowel with the other hand. It is slightly slower than applying excess mortar from your last brick and means that you will have enough mud to fill the joint.