Bricks
What better place to start this page than with a strong foundation? Doesn't get much stronger than bricks, huh?Orientations
Imagine you have a brick in your hand. Depending on how it's oriented, the sides all have different names.Brick of Chicago has the names nicely labelled with pictures. Labelling without pictures it pretty hard; who would have thought.
Brick-related terminology
- Rustification: making a brick's surface rough and "unfinished" deliberately.
- Ashlar: a finely-worked piece of stone; a brick, for example, is an ashlar. Ashlar don't have to be rectangular; stones are worked so that the bonds between them are thin, and being cubic is the easiest way to achieve this.
- Course/coursed construction: a course is what you find in outer walls of houses: a layer of the same-shaped unit of masonry (aka brick) over and over to produce a neat line. Coursed rubble construction uses randomly-shaped units, but they still make a semi-neat "layer".
- Wythe: if a course is a long line of bricks, a wythe is the part of the wall you see when you walk to one end and look at the line length-wise. The wythe is just the word for that oriention
- Dry stone/stack: the opposite of coursed: this is when randomly-assembled rocks are used to build. These rocks may be quarried/made into ashlar, or just used right away. This means that there is no horizontal "layering".
Other
Hot-dip Galvanisation
When you see a metal wall that looks like this:
This is a sign of "hot-dip galvanisation". The markings are the spangle of zinc--the visible feature of zinc crystals as they harden. The metal (iron or steel) that is "hot-dipped" is dipped into a pool of zinc before being cooled quickly to create a cover to protect from rust.