Behold, the Humble Brick

A recent visitor to the shop noticed a stack of bricks next to the door.

“What’s with them?” he asked.

Actually I find nice clean bricks to be useful in a multitude of ways in the shop, but perhaps none is more valuable than acting simply as a clean, dense, dead weight when I need to glue something but don’t need any more clamping power than to simply hold something in place while the adhesive dried.

Here is a small irregularly shaped piece of broken iron that I am epoxying back together.  There is no real way to clamp it even if I wanted to, so simply aligning it on a sand bag and letting the brick hold it steady and all is well.

Or, when assembling a large-ish panel, they do the trick wonderfully; just hold everything steady for a while.

Bricks also are a source of nearly identical spacers and I use a brick or several at least one time a week.  An old friend actually glued felt on the sides of bricks and used them as weights ween on finished surfaces.

A final use that warms me, literally, is to sit a pair of bricks on top of the kerosene heater in the winter.  They get hot and radiate heat wonderfully into the space, increasing the output efficiency of the system.

I’m partial to firebricks myself and am still using the pile I bought twenty years ago.