Building a stone wall.

[adam2]

Most of us are are least somewhat familiar with dry stone walls, these look simple but in fact require a great deal of of hard work and skill to build and maintain.

My friends are proposing to build a wall that LOOKS like a dry stone wall but that uses a sand/cement mortar mix in the interests of strength and durability.
Has anyone done this ? was it a success ?
Materials will consist of a mixture of natural stone, broken concrete blocks, broken concrete railway sleepers, and waste fake stone slabs.

[PS_RalphW]

https://concordstoneworks.com/blog/dry- ... tone-wall/

I have done a little dry stone walling. It is a very different skill to mortared walling, and is the more robust in the long term because it is much easier to repair and rebuild any damage.

[Lurkalot2]

I've not done any myself but have worked alongside masons. Generally the walls were mortared rather than dry laid but then a lot of the work was ashlared stonework. I have seen existing dry stone walls having a bedded capping laid on top and on one job which i think was in the cotswolds the wall was constructed in a sort of dry stone and rubble filled wall. The outside faces were in effect laid as one would do with a dry stone wall with the joints as tight as possible and some larger stones extending into the core of the wall which was mortared together. The mortar used was nearly always a lime putty /sand mix. On one job the architects specified brick dust added to the mix which they said would have a pozzalanic effect which perhaps a little embarrassingly none of the masons knew what that meant. We looked it up and it acts to make the lime mortar harder , comes from Pozzuoli where the romans quarried volcanic sand.

[kenneal - lagger]

You can use ground blast furnace slag in place of cement as that is pozzalanic as well.

[BritDownUnder]

An ambition of mine is to build a dry stone wall of my own in Australia. I have not seen many walls over here but they do exist particularly in South Australia.

Put in carefully I am sure a mortared inner rather than mud or rubble filling would probably be invisible from outside and greatly strengthen and prolong the life of a wall. Keep us informed on what goes on with this project please.

[adam2]

Project now started and not very successfully. Ground too wet and soft. First attempt was to use broken concrete railway sleepers as the base. These slowly disappeared from sight.
Second attempt was to tip many tons of inert builders ruble. Tipper truck got stuck in the mud. The load of rubble had to be tipped in the middle of the field before the truck could be moved. The pile has been re-branded as "installation artwork"

[BritDownUnder]

Thanks for the update.

I have put in a few small walls with mortar and made of brick into ground that was previously turf (i.e. a lawn). Dig a 10cm deep trench through the turf then use a sledgehammer to hammer in a few particularly sharp bits of broken concrete (broken with a jackhammer). Then concrete the first layer of stones or bricks to these hammered in stones.

It has worked for me with small walls. Not sure about the walls that are dry stone wall heights as these may be much heavier and have a higher downward force on the hammered in concrete.