I've done quite a few movies
on how to repoint chimneys,
and tuck pointing and all that stuff,
but I thought I'd show you all the tools I use here.
One of the first things I use on a chimney
is, that needs repointing, is a grinder like this,
and I'll go through the loose mortar with that,
first of all,
and it can, it will all come flying out.
And then I use this type of grinder here,
with a wire brush on it,
to take off any vegetation or rough old patch work
that's on the chimney.
Those two grinders seem to work really well.
They disburse the material over the roof quite far,
so it's impossible to tarp it off.
So then what I use is a cordless leaf blower,
to clean that stuff up or at least blow it off,
disburse it even further.
I don't know if there is any problem with that,
but whatever it is, I do it. That's how I do it.
And it seems to be, it's a small amount of material,
but it looks bad on a roof, so I just blow it around.
Here is the mortar mixing,
we normally need small batches of mortar,
so I like to use this pail,
and most of the brick chimneys around here are
brown brick, so rather than making a pure white mortar,
I'll add some brown dye to it.
And this is the perfect trowel to mix in a pail,
it's sort of a duck bill trowel.
And you can use a bigger trowel if you want,
but generally I use this to hold the mortar,
and this one to use the back end of that to fill
in the up and down joints, the perpendicular joints.
Now, when it comes to filling in the bed joints,
I use a variety of sizes of trowel here,
tucking trowels all the way from,
not sure what that one is, but quarter inch,
I guess. And that one's probably five sixteenths.
Three eighths.
And half.
I don't know if that's a little bigger or not,
And if I'm doing stone work, or something,
with really big joints, then I use something like that.
If I want to have a round convex joint on it, I'll,
or concave joint, I'll use a convex jointer.
And the brush is to brush off everything,
at the end of it, and clean everything up.
Of course I use a drop sheet on the roof,
to catch the wet mortar.
And I use this special mix mortar,
I don't bother with sand,
and masonry cement anymore,
very often.
So I use this pre-mix mortar,
and it's called Steels Specialty Mortar.
Anyway, that's the one I'm using now.
Also, a couple of other things I use is,
to moisten the joints, I use
some water in a spray bottle like that.
And those are the tools we need to
make a chimney repointing job.
At the end of it, rather than sweeping the roof off,
I find that my leaf blower does a better job again,
because sweeping it
if you happen to get a little bit of wet mortar crumbs
on the roof, when you sweep it,
it pushes it into the shingle,
whereas this one sort of lifts it off of the shingle
much better.
Much better way of doing it.
So, that's repointing tools,
I'm sure everybody's got their own specialties,
but those are the basics.
The important one is to have the right size of
flat jointer, or tucking trowel, I call them.
And that tucks the mortar,
makes sure the mortar gets way back into the
into the joint.
If you have too big of one, it won't push the mortar
in far enough, and you've got
some problems with that.
So, I hope that's helpful.
It's, I've been doing this for years,
and I never really shared all those tools.
So that's cool.
Here's a few more tools,
in case you're in an area where you don't
want to make dust,
or just have a small job to do.
This is called a plugging chisel,
and it's for taking the mortar out of brick joints.
And this is a brick hammer,
with those two, you can get the mortar out.
And you can also brush it off by hand,
assuming you don't want to use the power tools.
We always use cordless tools on the roof,
because having cords up there,
is a real problem because if you step on them,
they tend to roll,
and that gives you that jerking motion on your back,
which doesn't do very well.
One more thing on the cordless tools,
is that up until now, cordless tools weren't all that good.
The batteries didn't last very long.
But I've been able to do quite large chimneys
on a single charge with both of these.
Ryobi and Rigid tools with the lithium ion
eighteen volt batteries.
These are the larger batteries,
they last longer.
And the leaf blower is a fantastic item,
it cleans your chimney out of the mortar,
loose mortar, it blows it right off of it,
and cleans out the roof totally.
Saves a ton of time.
I also use it on the sidewalks here,
I get this whole front blown off,
on one charge easily.
And it's one of the best tools I've ever bought.
And I bought it basically,
because I wanted the weed eater that came with it.
I thought I would never use this.
I thought it would be useless,
but it's not, it's perfect.
And going on the roof with it is really good,
because no cord.
Closed Captioning by Kris Brandhagen. brandhagen@gmail.com