Coating Large Drywall Repairs & Butt Joints, in ONE pass! Beginners, you need this tool.

[Music] hey today i am going to show you the last video you're probably ever going to have to watch about coating butt joints or wide drywall repairs that's because i have been playing around with this kind of a skim coating blade and this thing works great i'm going to show you that right after this [Music] hey welcome back to my channel here at that kilted guy videos and today i am going to show you what might be the last video you ever need to watch about coating butt joints now i've seen a lot of videos out there showing all kinds of different ways and i've put some out showing how because it's one of the hardest things to coat by hand even with tools it's tricky and i'm going to show you why here i've got a little mock-up that's going to demonstrate that for you and then i'm going to show you a couple of reasons why we coat it the old way how hard that is then i'm gonna show you how this tool right here i think this is gonna simplify your life if you're struggling with coating wide drywall repairs or butt joints things like that you're going to love this i want to thank marshalltown tools for sending me this 40 inch skim coating blade but wait till you see what else this blade will do now hey why am i wearing this hat right now you're going to want to be watching my videos here coming up because in a future video here in the real near future i'm going to be introducing you to one of the most innovative strapping technologies i've ever seen so be sure and stay tuned and you're gonna like that one and hey as always if you like learning these kind of tasks like this i've got over 170 videos as of this date so be sure and click that subscribe button and click the bell icon right next to it that way you get notified each time i put out a new video it's my goal to pass on my 35 years of drywall experience to you guys and help you learn how to do it right and also i'm going to put a lot of good information in the description down below like a link to this tool right here and some other a bunch of other good drywall tools as well as our new etsy store where i've got ebooks i've got printable guides i've got merchandise like 24 grit sanding discs that you can't hardly find anywhere so check that out down below okay hey let's move over here to my easel and i'm going to show you what i'm talking about okay i've created this little mock-up here because i've showed you before what we're trying to accomplish with the butt joint most of the videos i've seen they just do it and try and tell you verbally and that's really too hard to understand when i was new to this it took me years to get good at coating butt joints i tried every different way i'd usually have to sand way too much and i just couldn't get it to quite come out as quickly and as easily as i can these days these days i've coated tens of thousands of them so i'm pretty good but i know why it's a struggle because it's hard to coat something this wide now the reason we have to coat a butt joint this wide or it could just be a repair where maybe you cut out a piece this big and you got to coat it really wide is because of what i'm going to show you right here so let's just imagine that this black line is your sheetrock so we're looking at the ceiling as if we were right up there looking across it so that's the half inch thick sheet rock right there and now let's imagine you had to do a a bud joint right here so that's the mesh tape or the paper tape now i've made that a little bit thicker just for illustration so you can see what's going on and then let's imagine that that uh go this way this is the mud that you're gonna put on here and you can see it would be nice and flat if you didn't have that but we're trying to cover that so what we're trying to do is we're trying to create this gentle sloping hump that's white enough that it's not going to show when the light hits it because light is everything shadows are what give away bad joints and other defects now here's an example of a ceiling i took a picture of where you couldn't see any of this until i put the light up near the ceiling and the reason you can see it is because of how abruptly the humps terminate basically so if they'd sloped off further you wouldn't see them so by creating a nice gentle hump that makes the light taper off so gently that you just can't see it so this is what we're trying to accomplish let's put this back on here now you can see our our mock-up joint tape right here we're trying to get our mud high enough where it covers these outer corners and a little bit more it cannot be just right to that or telegraph through so you got to get it a little bit thicker so we're trying to put this coat on in this arch like this and you can see how gentle that is it just gradually tapers out now why do we need it so wide well let's back up and see what happens if we go narrow okay now we're going to imagine that we're coating it just this wide which is about 14 inches wide this is a 14 inch knife so you can see it's just a little over 14 inches now we're still trying to cover that same amount so now we have to go up here to about like this and you can just see that the drop-off is a lot steeper and the steeper it gets the more the shadow will show so that's basically the premise now i'm going to show you an illustration right here that shows that in a printed illustration and if you want to download that check out my etsy store i'll have that available there so you can print it out for further uh future reference when you're doing this okay what i've done is taken that down i put some masking tape up here put two layers just to give it a little bit of thickness it's probably still not as thick as joint tape would be with mud under it but this is going to illustrate what we got to do and i'm using masking tape because this is just a mock-up i'll clean all this off wipe this down i can do another video after this so i'm just going to peel this up now first let me show you the way the majority of guys who are hand finishers do this you can do this with a hawk in a trowel or a pan and a knife it really doesn't matter whatever you're good at and comfortable with i always recommend a pan and a knife for novices mainly because it's a little easier i think and the tools cost quite a bit less a good trowel is something like fifty dollars a good knife is like fifteen so save yourself some money and get the same quality work i've used both and i just grew up using a pen and a knife so i can get the same quality out of it that you can with the hawk and trowel okay so i've got a gopro up here so you can get a top-down view as well as this one and okay so what i would normally do in the the old-fashioned way well it's still a good way but coating it with a 14-inch knife i would start here and just put a good solid coat on right down the middle and then i'd move over here and kind of overlap it and do basically the same thing now i didn't stir this mud up and it needed it and that's what you'll get it'll kind of break apart a little more until you get it kind of mixed up better and then i might have to add a little bit more and i want that solid cover so then i would come back and feather these edges and then i might you can go like down the middle and then come over here and do these and that would basically give you a coated butt joint and again this way works but i'm going to show you the difference when i bring out this other blade now these do come in different sizes this is a 24 inch the one i'm going to show you is a 40 inch because when you're coating a butt joint it's got any hump at all you usually need somewhere around 30 inches 36 inches so that 40 inch gives you enough to do a little overlap now the bigger the hump the wider you got to go again because you got to have a higher peak here so it's got to go further out there you can tell how much it needs it by putting your knife on it you hear that rocking sound well you'll see it when you're doing that and the more it rocks the more the hump occasionally it doesn't rock if that's the case just coat it down the middle like a recessed joint and see if that works it may still need a little bit but some of them actually are recessed just by accident more than anything okay so what you want to do is just put a lot of mud on here so i'm just going to put a little bit more over the top i'm going to give you a quick lesson on spreading like i've done many times before you want your mud to be fairly medium thick for this now mine's a little bit thin because i had it in a bucket with water on it that thinned it down but you can see it still doesn't run off of here but if i shake it a little bit it'll start dripping so it's a little bit thinner than i want but you can make this work so you put your knife against the wall at about a 45 degree angle and you push a little bit and kind of lean it over so it's probably actually more like a 35 degree angle and as you come down you keep a firm pressure if you don't you'll start getting this effect so you keep a firm pressure and then as you go down you lean it over and lean it over until your knuckles almost scrape see i made mine scrape because i purposely went too far so you just it's better to go at a little bit of speed if you go too slow i think it's actually harder so put quite a bit on for this method for this knife it's better to put too much on than not enough then you want to feather this outside edge and you just tilt your knife like this bend the blade and pull it down that edge and just kind of feather that outside edge and that helps so you don't leave quite so much of an edge here now if you think you got it really thick here you could wipe this off but i'd leave it just like this now let's break out this blade now this blade has a very flexible blade right here with a rigid backing so it's got a little flexibility but at the same time it isn't too flexible or it wouldn't work too well and you can find out more about this blade it's really nice i've compared this to other brands this one's a little less money and it works great so to use this get you a nice firm hold about like this get up here and you got to push pretty firmly but lean it over again if you stand it up too much you'll wipe it off like i did right there so you want to lean it over push firmly i forgot this thing's on wheels and the wheels aren't locked it took off on me okay and generally after you do each one you've got a lot of mud on here you want to just wipe that off and toss it back into your pan that's the one disadvantage this you can't wipe this into your pan so because it moved i got a little bit over here if you get a little bit of an outside edge it's actually okay you can sand that off you're not going to have any sanding to do in the middle here unless you put it on tooth it and let's go ahead and wipe that one more time [Applause] [Applause] and there we have it that is about as perfect as you can get you didn't have to worry about did you tilt your knife too much put too much pressure on this side that side it just kind of sculpts it into the shape you want quickly and effectively okay so i'm going to take some close-up pictures here and try and show you how well this came out so you can see i mean i'm looking at it up close and i i think this thing looks great it's going to have a great profile when it dries all it's going to require is a little light sanding out here now butt joints usually require two coats because you're putting it on so thick and it always shrinks might always shrinks around 35 percent and because of that you're going to need to come back and do this one more time with an even lighter coat the second time and then all you do in the end is feather out these edges if there's any like bubbles which happen a lot when you put it on heavy you would scrape those off and or sand them and just fill them in but otherwise there's no lap marks in here it's ready to go and hey i forgot to mention what i used for mud today was a product called usg plus three now if you don't have that in your area just get a lightweight all-purpose you could use a regular weight all-purpose but it's a little harder to work with it's stickier and it dries harder so it's harder to sand this stuff is like butter to sand and it does a great job now i'm going to put links to these tools and more in the description and be sure and subscribe and i look forward to seeing you guys on the next video take care everybody

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 279,348

Rating: 4.8695025 out of 5

Keywords: coating butt joints, drywall finishing, butt joints, drywall joints, drywall butt joint, drywall taping and mudding, that kilted guy, drywall butt joints, skim coating blade, skim coating knife, easy way to coat butt joints, best way to coat butt joints, kilt drywall, kilted guy, butt joint drywall, how to finish a butt joint, drywall tips and tricks, drywall mudding

Id: gguhL0_1it0

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021