Mountain Home Air Force Base, Hangar 208

Hangar 208 at Mountain Home Air Force Base is a historical building, and the chimney on it is not a house chimney. It is a brick stack that runs the full height of the hangar and then keeps going.

The requirement was short to write down and long to do: repair the damaged brick and repoint the mortar to match the original. We sent a sample of the old mortar to a laboratory to have its makeup determined and mixed to that. Even then it is not an exact match, and there is no such thing. The sand they used a hundred years ago came off a riverbed, and you cannot go get it now. What the lab buys you is a mix built on what the mortar actually was. The crown at the very top was the worst of it, cracked straight through.

We rebuilt the top portion of the stack first, then replaced all the mortar in the shaft below it, working off a boom lift the whole way. It is a long way up and a slow way down.

From the crown down to the roofline the joints are full and the brick is sound again. The stack looks the way it did when it was built during the Second World War, which on a building like this one is the entire objective.