A distinction is made according to the thickness of the joints:
– walls on ordinary joints, with a thickness of not more than 15 mm,
– walls on thin joints, with a thickness of not more than 3 mm.
Walls with ordinary joints can be made of ordinary mortar or light mortar. When the type of mortar used and the thickness of the joint were not specified when determining the, is accepted, that it is a wall made of ordinary mortar.
Bricks with standard dimensions are used to make the walls. In Poland, the valid brick size is 25x12x6.5 cm. Until the 1950s, bricks with dimensions were used 27 x 13×7 cm. The thickness of the wall in cm of brick used in the past and now is given in the table.
Wall thickness in bricks and cm
|
Thickness in bricks |
0,5 | 1 | 1,5 | 2 | 2,5 | 3 | 3,5 |
| Brick 27 x 13×6 | 14 | 27 | 41 | 55 | 69 | 83 | 97 |
| Brick 25 x 12×6,5 | 12 | 25 | 38 | 51 | 64 | 77 | 90 |
The brick placed in the wall parallel to the face is called "stretcher bricks", while placed perpendicular to the face of the wall, it is called "head".
There are many ways to tie a brick to a masonry, some of them not used. In Poland, there are basically two methods of bonding bricks to the wall:
a) traditional binding (with some variations), which can be called a two-layer bond consisting of layers: a stretcher and a cap,
b) modern binding, called multi-layer.
The general rule of traditional tying is this, that none of the welds of two adjacent layers may coincide; transverse welds must be shifted relative to each other by 1/4 or 3/4 brick length, while the longitudinal ones pass by o 1/2 or 1/4 bricks. To achieve this in the forehead of the wall (beginning or end) brick parts should be used, three-quarter rounds ("Nines"), halves (“sixes ") and quarters ("Three"). The longitudinal seams of the stretcher layer have faces (e.g.. external wall) "Carts" running along the entire length of the wall , while the "head" joints reach the joints of the transverse wall
Multilayer bonding is about this, that only every fifth and sixth layer; they are tied similarly, as in a traditional binding. The four layers following them have longitudinal joints overlapping, while the transverse welds are shifted by 1/2 bricks.
Walls with traditional brick bonding have a higher load capacity than multi-layer bonded walls.