Beveled edge

The Brick Industry Association's own list of edge shapes is short, and beveled is one of only four names on it.

BIA's technical note on clay pavers says "Pavers can have edges that are square, round, beveled or relieved." A beveled edge is the angled one in that list, shaped so the top of the unit slopes rather than meeting the face at a right angle. BIA adds that "fired pavers can be tumbled to create distressed edges", a separate mechanical treatment covered on its own at tumbled paver, so a tumbled unit and a beveled one are not automatically the same thing.

ICPI's glossary has its own defined term for the angled top edge, and its definition opens by describing a chamfer as a 45 degree beveled edge. The full geometry, the angle and the width it usually runs, lives at chamfer rather than here. Unilock's installation notes put the two words side by side, telling installers to keep jointing material "approximately 1/8” below the chamfer (bevel edge) of the paver", one name inside parentheses right after the other.

Those lines are the basis for treating beveled edge and chamfer as one feature in maker usage, and SEK-Surebond's bulletin, which sets a chamfered paver apart from a non-beveled one, reads the same way. The equivalence is ICPI's, Unilock's and SEK-Surebond's wording, not a rule that every catalog uses the two words identically.

A paver without an angled top edge is what SEK-Surebond's technical bulletin calls a non-beveled paver, and its joint sand line treats that case the same way it treats a tumbled surface: sand "should not exceed the bottom of the chamfer or 1/8" below the surface of a non-beveled or tumbled paver surface." The bulletin does not say why it groups the two; read plainly, a non-beveled paver has no chamfer bottom to measure from, and a tumbled unit may have none. What that joint sand line means for a sealing job is the argument tumbled pavers cleaned differently carries in full.

A paver's edge profile is a separate choice from the pattern it is laid in and how it is bedded: a herringbone or running bond layout, laid sand-set. None of those words describes the edge itself.