Shoutout to the old foreman in Gary who called my sponge float a 'crutch' and made me prove him wrong

Sam Murphy · 2026-09-17T17:35:04.812387+00:00

Two weeks back I was laying a block wall in Gary, Indiana and an old foreman named Ray walked by and said my sponge float was a crutch for guys who never learned to read the mortar. I laughed it off at first, but he kept going, said he laid 40 years of block and never owned one. So I did the thing where I stopped using it for a whole day and honestly the wall looked rougher, not better. On softer blocks the float is what keeps me from tearing the face, and Ray's way only worked because he mostly ran hard units with stiff mix. What got me was that he wasn't wrong for his time and his jobs, he was just wrong for mine. It hit different because I realized half the 'real bricklayers don't need that' talk is just guys describing their own past. Anybody else got an old timer story like this, where their advice was solid for them but did not survive contact with your actual site?

SMM Buzz

Loading…

Shoutout to the old foreman in Gary who called my sponge float a 'crutch' and made me prove him wrong | Bricklayers - SMM Buzz