Find Out the BEST Filler to Use for Trim Work!

so i'm going to be doing a bunch of baseboard repairs around my house because well so before i begin the arduous repair process for all the baseboards i like to figure out what's going to be the best filler to use in terms of durability ease of use and then what's going to turn out the best after it's all painted so in order to figure that out i've created this little sample board here with three different sections we've got open miters we've got damage here just blunt force trauma on the corners we've got nail holes and then we've just got some dents on the face of the boards so we're gonna test out three products the first one we're gonna look at is a bondo this stuff is called dynatron 650 3m makes it the second thing we're going to look at here is just a standard wood filler this stuff you can grab from the home depot it's made by elmer's it's pretty nice i like it in the squeeze tube it'll last longer and it's a little easier to use than the tubs and then the third product is what i would normally use here and probably most people around this area use this product daptridex it's just a spackle it goes on pink it dries white so we'll start off here on the bottom section with the dry decks this stuff is the slowest drawing it's between one to five hours before you can sand it or paint it so when i usually use this stuff i'd usually just use my finger on these little indents here i will use a two inch knife just to get it nice and flat and we're gonna do one coat on the nail holes and we'll probably end up doing two coats on the corners with the damage and then perhaps two coats on these impact damages as well so the next filler that we'll use here is just the standard wood filler here from elmer's this stuff says 15 to 8 15 minutes to eight hours in between sanding so there's quite a range it'll depend on how deep you're going with the filler it'll probably take two or three hours so about the same as the dry decks in terms of drying time so again you can put this stuff into the nail holes with your finger as well this is all kind of like water-based stuff it's not and then the last product that we're gonna work with here is the dynatron the bondo this is a product that i grabbed from cloverdale paint but you can get it off amazon as well it's made by 3m i'll put a link in the description now they recommend using a plastic putty knife for this stuff this stuff is definitely more toxic than the other two so your best bet is to keep it on the putty knife and we'll let that dry up and then we'll come back i'll let you know the dry times here we'll sand these up and we'll hit them with a second coat so it's been about two and a half hours now and surprisingly enough the wood filler and the drydex is dry and you could definitely sand that now but the bondo in the deep the deep areas it's still soft like you can so i ended up leaving this stuff dry overnight it's all completely dried out now and you can see with the bondo there's considerable shrinkage in these corner areas and even in the nail holes we definitely need a second coat so what we're going to do is sand this up i'll re-coat all this stuff but i'm going to leave just one coat on these nail holes on the face just to see what that looks like with the finished paint because in reality you're not going to want to do two coats on your nail holes so after giving these things a quick sand here just a couple of thoughts um the wood filler and the bondo was a bit of a pain to sand you couldn't really sand it with just your typical painter's sanding sponge so i had to bring in one of these little sanding blocks that i use quite a bit if you want to see how to make these check out this video right up here these are awesome so yeah this sanded down the uh the bondo and the wood filler pretty nicely and then with the dry decks like just the sanding sponge this stuff the dry deck sands down super easy it's probably why most painters use it theoretically you could probably just paint this drydex area up right now and probably look about 90 so what we'll do now is we'll hit this with one more coat of each of the fillers we'll leave this face of the baseboard here with just one coat to see what the finished product will look like but we'll do another coat on the corner damaged areas and then the damaged areas and nail holes on this face so i'm going to go ahead and let this dry hopefully it won't take quite as long this time i'll give it a final sand then i'll quickly throw on two coats of paint and we'll finally answer the question what's the best filler here is it the bondo the wood filler or the dry deck spackle so that's two coats of filler we're all sanded we're ready to go i did have to go back for a third time and touch up one little corner here on the bondo baseboard i used my heat gun to speed up the drawing process so we're all ready so let's slap on two coats of paint so i've got two coats of paint on here and the results are pretty clear if we look over on the side with just one coat on all the nail holes the clear winner is the dry deck spackle you can't see really any of the pinholes through there the second best is the wood filler it's pretty dang good as well there's a couple little spots here that aren't great clear loser is the bondo the bondo is terrible um yeah it doesn't look good at all you can see all the nail holes if we look over at the side that i ended up doing two coats and we had those blunt force hammer traumas on the side here the clear winner is the wood filler the wood filler looks great you can't see any of those dents from the hammer second best is probably the bondo uh with the spackle being the worst just because spackle on those big areas it sands so easy that you can see here it's just sanded out in a few spots and then if we look at the corners here with the damage clear winner again is the wood filler you can't even notice any of the damage the corner looks perfect second best is probably the dap drydex and the clear loser is the bondo you can see you can still see the damage through here the red color is flashing through it doesn't look great so what i'm going to end up doing in the future is continue to use the dap dry decks for any of my nail holes that way you can get away with just one coat build it up a little bit it sands down super nice and then for any of the bigger repairs i'm definitely gonna use the wood filler that turned out amazing on this corner as well as these big dents in the face here the wood filler is definitely the way to go it's quite a bit harder than the dry decks so it sands up and it kind of keeps it's a similar hardness to the baseboard so you can get a nice smooth finish on there and then in terms of the bondo now there's a lot of high-end painters and cabinet shops that use bondo but for me i didn't really get good results with it i'm sure there's better techniques you might be able to use but the stuff's pretty toxic and it's a bit of a pain to work with in that you can't get it on your finger i mean you could but i don't know might give you some kind of a chemical burn so i'm not going to use the bondo anymore i wasn't really impressed with it so if you're going to be installing repairing or painting some baseboards or trim in the near future be sure to check out these videos right over here thanks for watching we'll see you on the next video

Channel: The Funny Carpenter

Views: 351,104

Keywords: Bondo, Dynatron 650, Bondo 1 part, Drydex Dap, Elmer's wood filler, painting tips, carpenter tips, funny carpenter, finish carpentry

Id: lDj-vmbmnLk

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021