Lime putty making.

[Will Shotton <shottonmasonry@zzzzzzzzz>]

Hi Deadalus,

Thanks for the welcome. I had the opportunity to work with a group who built a small beehive limestone burning kiln on a 6'x6' concrete forklift-able slab. It was about eight feet high with a lower door for the hardwood, a cleanout and an upper larger door with a heavy duty grate to hold the local dolomitic limestone samples.

We held a couple of overnight burns in shifts and hoisted a few pints by the fire! It was definitely a fun experience. We slaked it over the next eight months in drums for the first batch and kept some for the next year about 17 months later. It turned out really well.

We also conducted some compression tests with the help of a local structural engineer's equipment. Some of the heritage lime mortar creations included horse hair, charcoal, ground salmon bricks and wood chips. You definitely want to keep the protective clothing/glasses on for the slaking too!

Has anyone else had much success with lime putty making?

It really brought it home how much labour went into masonry before machinery took a lot of the load. I was having some excavations done next to a church I was restoring and the stratification of the front lawn revealed one of the original lime/sand mixing spots from the original construction in 1880. It takes a whole lot of elbow grease to beat the sand into the lime putty the way they used to!

Talk to you soon,

Will