Brampton Brick doesn’t go as far back as 7000 B.C.E, when the earliest mud bricks were baked at a settlement outside of Jericho. But they’ve been in the masonry business long enough to know all the tricks to building with clay, stone and block.

Mike Kriesel, director of architecture masonry and landscape sales at Brampton Brick, has worked on both the production and architectural side of the brick business. Over the years, he’s had plenty of meetings with architects who didn’t like how a masonry project went, or simply wanted to know what went wrong.

“This may help answer some questions,” he told attendees of his seminar on masonry tolerances at the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) annual conference at the Niagara Falls Convention Centre. From crooked walls to units installed backward, Kriesel has seen his fair share of bad masonry—both concrete and clay.

During an hour-long seminar, Kriesel touched on an array of masonry tolerances, from the gap between bricks to the amount of acceptable variation in a wall. Architects may seem far removed from the standards governing masonry, but Kriesel says getting these tolerances right is essential.