# scratch coat wire



## seattlejoe (Apr 13, 2013)

4x4? Really .thats odd i cant recall useing any. Dont know where you seen that. Oh well.
What ever you guys! I didn't come here looking for this. I thought it was a pretty simple question. I guess I am just crazy.


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## NYCB (Sep 20, 2010)

Dude, Durock is made to go over wood sheathing to act as the bonding surface, the wood provides the tensile strength, best used inside a home. When the same installation is done outside we use tar paper as a vapor barrier and lath mechanically attached direct to the sheathing.

Like Diamond said you are going to have some serious movement issues, I brought up the pillars I have seen fail just for that reason.

Your brain child or not, you are responsible for the installation and we don't want to see you have to do it twice. 

The original post was about metal lath I know, but you don't need lath over Durock when installing cultured stone, a warning sign to me that you are about to get in over your head with a product you aren't familiar enough with.

You came in and presented an idea and the people that do this stuff for a living offered you some advice, getting defensive about it isn't going make your job go any smoother.

To be brutally honest, if I was called in to finish that, I would turn it down.


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## Diamond D. (Nov 12, 2009)

Calm down cowboy, seems to me everyone has been quite civil and trying to answer your question. 
Maybe it's not what you wanted to hear, but there's no need to get your panties in a bunch.

Maybe my mistake but in the picture you put up, post #10, it looked like a 4X4 post on the corner.
Hard to tell from* that* angle. 

D.


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## brickhook (May 8, 2012)

Instead of spending $1000's of dollars trying to camalouge a bad concrete wall, maybe it would of been better removing the old wall and building a nice masonry wall.


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## jomama (Oct 25, 2008)

If that was a 3' tall fence, I think your approach "could" work, but being a retaining wall with the constant moisture and hydrostatic pressure behind it, I'm aprehensive to believe it's going to see a decent lifespan.

And I'd use the galvanized diamond mesh as well, just rip it in half as the other poster mentioned. Laps aren't really a big deal when you have wood behind to fasten to............


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## 6stringmason (May 20, 2005)

seattlejoe said:


> I was wondering if there is any reason I couldn't use a galvinized hardware cloth with say 1/4" square holes instead of expanded metal?



You got numerous answers to your question, and you proceed to get upset and say you didnt come here for 'this', what ever 'this' is. If 'this' is other peoples ideas as to a better way to go about it, then why did you ask in the first place?

Seems to me you have it all figured out.


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## wnc viking (Aug 4, 2011)

I do not know about crazy but you are coming acrossed as a jerk.


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## Nick520 (May 2, 2013)

They were referring to the 4x4 post on the corner of the wall. How did you fasten the pt wood to the wall? Why do you want to wire lath a cement board? If you have, I don't know 10 MASONS telling you this doesn't seem like a logical efficient or durable approach it should raise a red flag. Just because tony at the hardware store said it would work doesn't nessecarily mean it will.


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## NYCB (Sep 20, 2010)

I think we scared him off.


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## SeattleJoe70 (Jun 17, 2017)

Hello everybody, this is the original poster of this posting. Different name because I couldn't remember my old password and couldn't find a password reset option. 
Anyway, I was just out at this job site today for the final time. Due to the owner sold the property. And as I was walking around the house reminiscing on all the time and different projects we did to this house, I remembered this posting while walking the length of the retaining wall. So I thought I'd give an update about the wall. First and foremost, I'd like to apoliapologies if I came off as a pr*ck when I last posted. Long hours working alone makes for a tired boy. 
Enough said, So most importantly the home owner and pretty much everyone that seen the wall gives nothing but compliments. I've had more people ask about "who built that awesome wall ?" while i was working on other projects than any other thing I've built ever. And I'm very happy myself at how it turned out. So I took a few more pictures to share with the forum, and I've got a bunch more of pictures of the wall while under construction. It's been about what 4 or 5 years now and I walked the entire length of the wall.kicking or hitting every so often checking for soft or problem areas. Which I found none. And I also walked the entire length on top of the cap. And it to is absolutely solid. The only problems I found in any part of the wall was one area that has two pieces of cap where the grout lines have hairline cracks. But the blue stone is not loose at all. And is still solid. It's pretty hard to get a picture of the entire wall or even more than 10' of wall due to the plants that are growing in front of it now. But you get the idea by looking at the wall yourself.
I ended up not using a scratch coat at all,.my original thought was to do it for nothing more than a rougher surface to stick the stone onto. For more grip. And as long as I was putting mud over the surface id might as well have some metal in there as well.
But I ended up using a high performance thin set I forget the name of it now. But I do remember it was damn expensive and hard to find. Then for the cap stone I put 2"×36" blue stone. which I also installed over the stairs. I tilted a stone over every other stair tread and used them to hide the low voltage lighting, flush mounted a mailbox and two address light boxes. Then gave the whole thing two coats of sealer for that wet look. The home owner loved it so much he had me do the chimney as well. And that really tied the wall in to the house. And it made the whole property look fantastic. The whole thing problem took me 2 months working alone. Then I added the custom wroght iron gate to the front stairs. After that I moved onto the driveway. and ill add those pictures just as soon as I figure out the easiest way to resize them on my phone


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## SeattleJoe70 (Jun 17, 2017)

I'll post a couple more


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## SeattleJoe70 (Jun 17, 2017)

there you go . all you nay sayers!


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## kirkdc (Feb 16, 2017)

:blink:


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## 91782 (Sep 6, 2012)

finished job looks good!


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## JBM (Mar 31, 2011)

Looks good, I like the gate!


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## Inner10 (Mar 12, 2009)

Call this guy the pizza man...because he delivers.


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## kirkdc (Feb 16, 2017)

I still have my doubts. <squinting>


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## rblakes1 (Jan 8, 2015)

That came out nice. That gate is really cool looking, did you make the gate yourself? 

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk


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