On the Diamond Edge


When Dad had trouble finding reliable laborers in the summer to help him lay bricks, he solved the problem by drafting my brother and me into service. From age 13 on I knew what I would be doing each summer. When we started, the two of us together could just about do a grown laborer’s work—and we split a grown laborer’s near-minimum wage. As we got older we grew more capable, and got paid a bit more.

Since I was the oldest and most responsible, Dad entrusted me with any work that involved operating machinery. This mainly meant making several batches of mortar a day with the electric mortar mixer. But there was one other piece of equipment that I occasionally had to run. This was a specialized item that many people don’t even realize exists—a masonry saw.

Believe it or not, bricks sometimes have to be cut. If a half or quarter brick is needed, it’s simple enough to break it in two with a brick hammer. This tool has a kind of blunt cutting surface in place of a carpentry hammer’s nail-pulling claw. Both my brother and I occasionally had to make multiple cuts with a brick hammer to use for brick window sills. If only one cut was needed in a particular spot, Dad would often as not make it himself with the edge of his trowel. This feat impressed anyone who saw it.

Now and then a job featured walls that came together at an odd angle, or spots that needed to be filled in with masonry that was less than a full brick high or thick. Situations like this required many bricks cut at just the right angle, or even bricks that had been sawn in two lengthwise. That’s where the masonry saw came in.

Dad had inherited his saw from his own father. As a child I remember seeing the “brick saw” standing around outside derelict. Eventually Dad sanded off all the rust, overhauled or replaced its electric motor, and painted the whole thing a bright blue. It did not stay that bright color for long.

The masonry saw looked like a big, stoutly constructed metal table. Its solid-steel frame was so heavy that the saw needed broad wooden boards underneath to keep the metal feet from sinking into soft ground. The top of the table had sides that made it into a kind of basin several inches deep. A metal saw table with tiny caster wheels ran back and forth on the edges of these sides. The blade and blade housing sat above the saw table on one end of a long rocker arm. At the other end it was counterbalanced by the big, heavy electric motor.

The whole thing weighed several hundred pounds. Just loading it into the small trailer Dad used to haul his scaffolding and other equipment was a major operation. Dad would back the trailer close to the heavy end of the saw. Then, with Dad on one end of a two-by-four run through the saw’s frame, and my brother and me on the other, we would lift the end of the monstrosity and drag it onto the end of the trailer. Then we would pick up the lighter end and slide it all the way on. The motor and rocker arm made the whole business dangerously top heavy, so we had to lift and handle it with care.

After the equally awkward business of unloading, Dad would set a scaffold jack beside the saw, hang the saw’s switch box on it, and wire it in with whatever source of electricity was available on-site. We would set a small blue barrel of water beside the saw and hang a waterproof, immersible electric pump in it. This would maintain a small, regular flow of water through the saw blade’s housing to keep the blade cool. Failure to cool it could ruin the three-hundred-dollar diamond blade. We certainly didn’t need that! The basin on top of the table caught most of the runoff water and returned it to the barrel for reuse. After cycling through a few times the water grew dark and heavy with brick dust. When we cleaned the barrel, we’d find several inches of gross-looking clay sediment to dump out.

On days when we had sawing to do, Dad would take the blade from his big truck-bed toolbox and carefully mount it onto the saw. He would then affix a small length of wood to the saw table with a little C-clamp to serve as a guide. He’d carefully sight the guide and do any needed tweaking to it. He might even make a test cut. When he was satisfied that he had the guide running right, he would give me instructions regarding the kind of cut we needed to make. Then it was time for me to get to work.

I found the saw more than a little intimidating to operate. For starters, there was the procedure to get it started. The blade wanted to stick when first turned on. I had to grab the blade with one hand, set it spinning, and, as soon as my fingers were clear, switch on the motor with the other hand. Getting the saw running might take a couple of tries.

Once started the saw made a whirring noise similar to, but subtly distinct from, the sound of a carpenter’s table saw. I would set a brick on the saw table, adjust it against the guide, and depress the metal foot pedal that brought the blade down almost onto the brick. I’d sight along the brick to make sure the blade was about to cut in the right spot. The narrow, high-velocity stream of water the blade threw onto the brick provided a handy marker to show exactly where it was about to cut.

Then I would depress the pedal a little farther and bring the blade down onto the brick. The saw’s whine grew into a nerve-shattering screech. I had to maintain just the right amount of pressure on the foot pedal to keep the blade engaged without it bouncing up and down on the brick, and advance the brick at just the right rate. If I let it get too far forward, the saw might snatch it from my hands and hurl it against the front of the saw. This never did any harm, but it could chip the brick, it was scary, and it was kind of embarrassing.

Aside from the noise, the possibility of having the brick grabbed, and my concern to do a good job—Dad was counting on me to do it right!—I was made nervous by the fact that my hands—sometimes covered by rubber gloves, sometimes bare—were spending a good deal of time within an inch or so of the blade. The danger was less than it might have appeared. A masonry saw’s blade is not a cutting surface in the strictest sense. It is actually a kind of very narrow high-speed grinding wheel. The worst a momentary accidental contact with it could have inflicted would have been a nasty friction burn. Dad had had this happen to him some years earlier. I made sure it never happened to me.

Experience naturally made me more confident in using the saw. It did not make the work any more comfortable. Bending over the saw table, with both hands on the brick and one foot on the pedal, made for an awkward working position. The noise never got any less noisy.

And I was constantly hit by the spray from the saw blade. The spray consisted of tiny droplets of water mixed with tiny fragments of dust from the brick that was being ground in two. They moved fast enough to sting the skin. The spray might momentarily cool me off, but getting wet on a hot, sticky Arkansas summer day ultimately left me feeling hotter and stickier. As the water evaporated, it left behind a coating of clayey brick dust on my sweaty skin, hair, and clothes. It felt even nastier than the mixture of mortar, masonry cement, and sweat that usually covered me. On days when I ran the saw, I was in more of a hurry than usual to take a bath when we got home. I can recall the bath water leaving a layer of grime to wipe away after it drained.

On a couple of jobs we used a smaller, simpler masonry saw provided by the contractor for whom Dad was working. This saw used a blade made of a cheap, friable material that abraded away as the saw did its work (You could actually see it getting smaller after a hard day’s sawing. Dad and I once amused ourselves by measuring its diameter and working circle formulas in our heads to calculate what percentage of the blade’s usable area remained. We both liked geometry. Dad’s affinity for it was one of the qualities that made him such a good mason.). It was not water cooled. Using this saw put the operator in a cloud of choking brick and saw blade dust. After sawing a hundred bricks or so with this one, I managed to feel even nastier than usual. My dust-laden hair had a texture like fine steel wool.

I worked with Dad each summer, sawing bricks on the rare occasions when that was required, all the way through college. After that I moved to the big city to go to grad school. It was the 1990s, and the city was experiencing a construction boom around the university where I worked. Now and then, as I walked by a construction site, I would hear a loud whirring or screeching sound. I’d pause to listen, and recognize the distinctive note of a masonry blade in action. And I’d walk on, smiling at the thought that the saw’s operator would never realize that one unlikely-looking passerby knew exactly what was going on.