Repairing brickwork? Choose the right scaffold.

For repair work on the brickwork of a two storey home you hire the Altrex RS51, built 75 cm wide. The deck size is not what decides it; the route to the damage is. Broken bricks tend to sit on the gable end, beside the chimney or along the back of an extension, so the build has to pass a side gate, squeeze between two fences or travel a garden path barely a metre across. You can hire a mobile scaffold in several widths, set out side by side in the overview of rolling towers.

Up top this job asks for very little around you: a bolster, a lump hammer, a small tub of mortar, a trowel and the bricks you plan to set that round. All of that sits comfortably on a narrow deck, not least because you are only ever working a patch of half a square metre. What counts here more than width is being able to push the whole tower along single handed, because you reposition far more often than on any other facade job.

You only reach for the RS52 and its 135 cm deck when the damage stops being individual bricks. Think of a whole panel of wall coming out, of two bricklayers working side by side, or of a stock of bricks you would rather keep upstairs than carry one at a time. If it is a single patch around six metres up, the MiTower is worth weighing: also 75 cm slim, meant for one person, topping out at 6.2 metres. That covers a single repair point and little else.

Walk the elevation first with binoculars, or with a photo blown up on your phone, and find the topmost spot you have to deal with. On a two storey house that is usually just under the eaves or beside a downpipe bracket, and a build for 6 to 8 metres of working height covers it. That leaves the deck at 4 to 6 metres, because a platform gives you about 2 metres of reach above itself. Which parts go into that is set out on the page for an eight metre build.

When repairing brickwork it is not only the highest broken brick that counts, but whether you can still see above it. To judge where a crack has come from you want the course above it close to your eyes, and that fails if your build stops level with the damage. Take your highest repair point, then add half a metre to it. In practice that difference amounts to one extra section, which you simply include when you reserve the tower and forget about again.

Book too tight and you end up chiselling with your arms above your head, which is doubly unpleasant on cutting work. You lose the feel of the hammer and knock the sound brick next door to pieces, while the dust lands in your face instead of at your feet. And you will be adding a section for that top course anyway, which eats half a working day. If the damage sits at first floor level, go for the taller of the two builds.

The strip under a repair point has to be empty, because everything you cut out lands there: lumps of old joint mortar, shards of the broken brick and a fine dust that gets into everything. So no bike, no wheelie bin and certainly no car, and lay a sheet you take with you every time the tower moves. That sheet saves you half an hour of sweeping between the paving later, where loose mortar otherwise beds itself into every gap.

Then look at where the four stabilisers land. They splay outwards and all four want firm ground under them, and along a wall with damaged brickwork that strip is often soft: a border, a gravel path or a sunken run of slabs against the plinth. Put a thick board or a spare paving slab underneath each one, and check with a spirit level that the build really is upright before anybody climbs. Sloping ground is dealt with in the note on ground that is not level.

One detail keeps coming back on this job: damage in brickwork usually sits right beside a leaking downpipe or under a gutter bracket that has worked loose. That is exactly where you now want your build to stand, and such a pipe must never be used as a support or jammed under a castor. Bear in mind too that you will come back to the same spot a second time to point, so keep the route to that position clear for the whole hire period.

The cutting out and the bedding go quicker than most people expect: a practised hand manages four to six bricks a day, including brushing out the cavity and mixing small batches. After that the work stops. The new brick has to be solid before you can press the joint around it, otherwise you shove it out of line or pull it loose again. For a house with a handful of damaged spots that puts you at three to five hire days.

Not all of those are working days, and that is precisely the point. Reckon on a day of cutting and bedding, then a day when you leave those patches alone, then half a day of pointing and checking. If it freezes, or the brickwork stays wet after a day of rain, the rhythm slips further, because fresh mortar and frost do not mix. Since you nominate the first and the last hire day yourself, you build those waiting days straight into the booking.

Your wallet barely notices the wait. The full amount covers your opening 24 hours and nothing beyond it; from the second day onwards, 95 per cent is knocked off the day rate, so a generous booking costs a fraction of what a second assembly takes in time and temper. The page of fixed rates shows how the rental price works out per build. Booking tight and then having to return is easily the dearest route through a brickwork repair.

With a deck length of 245 cm you cover a band of brickwork a good two metres wide without moving. In height you reach about a metre and a half of wall from one fixed position, and that rectangle is the panel in which you group your repair points. If two broken bricks sit close together, do them from the same position even if it only saves half a metre sideways. Every move you skip is half an hour gained, and those hours add up to whole hire days.

Go up with a fully loaded bucket rather than with odds and ends in your pockets: bolster and hammer, a brush for sweeping the cavity out, a sponge, some water and no more mortar than you will use within the hour. The replacement bricks travel up separately and go against the end of the deck, never loose along the edge. A brick falling from five metres is not only ruined itself, it is lethal for anyone walking beneath the tower.

Where people usually misjudge this job is the number of trips up and down the ladder. Forgotten mortar, a brick of the wrong size and a bolster left on the ground easily cost an hour a day between them, and that comes straight off your hire period. So run through your list out loud before you climb, every single time. If the repair turns into repointing the whole wall, count on extra positions and extra days as well.

What gets dropped off is a package of loose parts, counted and complete, not a ready made tower. Settle in advance on a spot for that stack, and leave the ground below your repair points free, since the rubble ends up there. A drive, a bit of lawn or the front garden all serve, as long as you can get past with a barrow. An order that reaches us on a weekday before 15:00 goes out to you the next working day.

The day everything arrives and the day it leaves again are yours to pick. That helps with brickwork repairs, because you want to assemble at a moment when no cutting is due yet: put the tower up calmly, look at the wall from close range and take out the first brick the following morning. Assembly is your side of the deal, working from the booklet and the film supplied with it. With a second pair of hands, half a day covers it.

Once the repairs are finished you break the build down and stack the parts somewhere dry, after which we come by to take them away. Hold off until your last joints feel dry, or you will smear wet mortar down the tubes and be scraping at them on the final morning. The figure for carting a set to your province and bringing it home again appears on the page about delivery costs, so it lands in your sums at the start instead of turning up as a surprise at the end of the job.

These deck boards are rated at 200 kg per square metre, which is what load class 3 of EN 1004 comes down to, and that is the ceiling you work under. On this job in particular you creep up on it without noticing, because a tub of mortar, a small stack of facing bricks, your cutting tools and you together weigh more than it looks. Spread that load along the full deck rather than piling it against one guard rail, and take down whatever this round no longer needs.

The usual agreements apply to cutting work too, and they are easy to forget when you only want a quick go at one brick. Lock the castors before you climb, never roll the tower even half a metre while someone is up there or your tub is still aboard, and get off as soon as the wind really picks up. After each move, check that all four stabilisers are back under proper tension. What the standard asks beyond that is set out in the article on this scaffold standard.

The risk that genuinely belongs to replacing bricks plays out above and below at once. Up top you work with hammer and bolster close to your face, so goggles and stout gloves are not a luxury here. Down below lies the zone where shards and lumps land, and you fence that off with tape or a few cones before the first blow. Warn the neighbours as well if you are close to the boundary, since dust travels further than the sheet reaches.