MEASUREMENT OF STONE AND BRICK Cost of Brick and Stone Work.— A common application of capacity measure is in preparing estimates for brick and stone work. Masons com monly measure stone work by the perch, 161 feet long, feet wide, and 1 foot thick, or 241 cubic feet. Brick work is commonly estimated by the thousand bricks. It is, however, cus tomary in many localities -to reckon stone work by the cubic foot instead of by the perch. Usually a 'deduction is made by bricklayers, masons, and joiners, for one half of all openings. But this should be clearly established in each case in the contract.
In computing the capacity of walls of cellars and buildings, masons and bricklayers multiply the, entire dis tance around the outside of the wall (the girth) by the height and thick ness. Thus the corners are measured twice. But this measurement applies only to the labor and not to the quan tity of material to be paid for.
Measurement of Stone and Brick Walls.—A perch of stone is 24.75 cu bic feet. When built in the wall, 21 cubic feet are allowed for the mortar and filling; hence 22 cubic feet of stone makes one perch of wall.
Masons estimate 3 pecks of lime and 4 bushels of sand to a perch of wall.
To find the number of perches of stone in A wall, multiply together the length, height, and thickness in feet and divide by 22.
Measurement of Brick Work.—The size of bricks varies, and rules for es timating the number of bricks re quired must be modified accordingly.
Bricks are now usually made 8 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 2 inches thick. Hence 27 bricks are required to make a cubic foot without mortar. But it is assumed that mortar fills of the space. The first step is to find the number of cubic feet in the wall by multiplying the length, height, and thickness together in feet, and if the bricks are of this size multiply the nuraber of cubic feet by 99i.
Formerly, however, and to some ex tent at the present time, bricks were made of two sorts and sizes--common brick, 7f inches to 8 inches long by 4f inches wide and 94 inches thick, and front brick, f inch longer and wider. Of common brick 90 are re quired to lay one cubic foot or 15 common brick will lay one square foot of wall 8 inches thick. Hence to es timate the number of bricks required for a wall 12 inches or more in thick ness, multiply together the length, height, and thickness in feet, and that product by 90; or for an 8-inch wall multiply the length by the height and that by 15. An allowance of one half should be made for doors, windows, and other openings. Multiply their length by their width and that by the thickness of the wall in feet. Deduct one half the result from the cubic contents of the wall before multiply ing by 90 or by 15, as above.