The Ultimate Experiment - Handmade Brick Firing

My family and I are transforming 1.25 acres into a homestead to sustain at least 4 people. Your channel inspiring and gives great instruction and ideas to really not need to buy a bunch of materials. Thank you so much for all of your content.

Round of applause for Townsends and our brick maker ancestors.

When I was a child back in the 1950s we lived near a working brickyard. I can still remember the siren they used to sound just before they started firing a load or bricks, all the women would rush out to remove any clothes from there Clothes lines as soon every thing out side would be covered in soot. The kilns were all coal fired and you could hear the roar of the fire from quite a ways away.

Watching them bake the bricks, bake the bread, cook the stew, it really makes you realize how much time was needed to just procure firewood in that period.

The steel plant my grandpa was working at, once demolished one of their chimneys. He thought "they won't miss the rubble". So he took it home and removed the old mortar from the bricks with a hammer and built his house out of them. The house is still in a perfect shape today. Didn't make them himself, but that is as close as it gets...

Those bricks that are well fired are called face bricks, they were used on the outside of a wall or the face. The ones not so well fired are common bricks used inside the wall. The wall of a house would be a foot thick, thicker if it was more than one story. The blackened bricks were used to build chimneys fireplaces and ovens where the blackened part didn't show. You have to be careful not to mix up the face bricks and common bricks, because the common bricks will not stand up to weathering.

My great grandfather ran a brickyard during the Depression. When my great grandmother died in childbirth, and the baby died with her, she left him with six children to raise, ages 2 to 18, my grandmother being the oldest. He didn't have anyone to watch the two year old at the beginning, so he would take her to work with him. He would sit her next to the brick kiln where it was warm, and draw a circle in the dirt, and she had to stay inside that circle and play with her doll all day. They had mechanized means of cutting the bricks by then, but they still built a kiln and fired them like this, from what I understand.

All of Townsend's videos are excellent and I have enjoyed them for years. This one surpasses all others because of the display of family and friends. That, above all other aspects, brings history to life. Seeing Ryan pick up his child with such love and enthusiasm is beyond what a normal history channel can give us.

It is great to see the young children running around and families eating together. This is truly a family event.

In Sioux Falls SD the only houses which survived one of the major floods belonged to the owners of the brick factory. They filled the houses with bricks so that they wouldn't wash away.

My grandfather was a brick layer, but even he did not have to make his own bricks! Huzzah to John & friends!!!

Can I just say that I love how great your content is? In a world filled with stress and strangeness, it's refreshing to have a channel like yours.

A few days ago I watched a video on the TV channel “How It’s Made” on making ceramic tiles over in Spain. After their initial firing; there was this fellow with an accurate hearing ability that could tell if the tiles were properly fired and no cracks or flaws in them by tapping them with a small hammer. The ring tone would indicate any issues with individual tiles. If they passed the test; they were sent in to be glazed and fired again. The the ones that didn’t sound good were discarded. Cool eh?

Brick by brick, it’s all coming together

Just imagine what this man and his family can do with a good budget from a documentary channel Instead they are funding alien documentaries

I’ll be 20 tomorrow, and going hunting with a flintlock this weekend, and a Townsends video today?! It’s gonna be a good week!

This channel is like a fine wine. It keeps getting better with time.

Such a great video! - I’ve been a kiln fireman in the brick industry for over 30 years now so you can imagine how happy I was to see this series. So glad you were willing to put all that effort into the project so I could better understand where my vocation began in our early years. Thank you so much! - as an aside, I just finished firing sixty thousand in the last eight hours but your run was the more gratifying accomplishment by far!

It's amazing how much appreciation you can gain for everyday objects by studying how they were made historically. It's hard to believe that there would have been someone who had dedicated their life to learning how to make some mundane item we take for granted. I consider myself to be a competent hand tool woodworker, but my skills would pall in comparison to craftsmen in the 18th century, and furthermore, almost everyone would have been skilled at something.

Is this just a really long-form tutorial on how to build a period-accurate colonial house?