HAWK AND TROWEL BASICS (FLAT JOINTS)

welcome back to Vancouver carpenter today I'm gonna show you how to coat flat joints with a hot control so for starters I've got my mud mixed pretty thick so this is gonna be my first coat on a flat joint and the flat joint of course is where the two recessed edges meet and create a joint that should be very flat so hopefully by now you're already comfortable with picking up the mud on both sides of the blade and you're familiar with the passes the feathering and the finishing passes so when coding a flat joint I usually do the loading pass this way and again I'm not holding it firm this and pulling it's loose like this so I'm gonna pick it up on my blade and another thing is it's not directly in the center of my blade it's actually on the top edge of my blade because the mud dripped down while you're applying it so on the top of my blade like so and then we're gonna pull backwards getting a nice even spread along here so the next pass is going to be your feathering pass and again I don't have a tight end when I'm doing this now I can either do it pulling this way or I can now do it pushing this way so I'm actually going to do it pulling didn't feather nicely so I'll give it another one and then this one again is pushing down on this side feathering that edge so now that I've done that I'm ready for my finished pass and that's about it flats are really the easiest ones you're gonna do so some people will actually press really hard and kind of dig it out and only fill in this little recessed edge I don't find that adequate I like to have just a little bit more about over here because sometimes the edges of the board aren't perfect and it'll create kind of a butt joint so you actually need a little bit more mud here to make it hide just perfectly and also a little bit of mud on there for shrinkage and to sand so now my next passes again I'm gonna load it like so load it like that but now at this point I'm gonna start pushing so then my finish pass feather I should say feather finish so so those ones really are that easy load feather the top feather the bottom finish pass that's how quickly you should be able to do it we can really just walk around a room quite quickly I also wanted to quickly show you how it would tackle something like this so instead of just doing the flat joint I actually will coat the entire area I've got a butt going here I've got a corner here and a flat joint so it doesn't always matter how you put the mud on it's how you take it off right into the corner there so now I'm going to feather into my flat I'm gonna feather this whole bottom edge and I'm actually gonna use my knife to get this top edge and clean it out basically I've just coated my corner now it's the same sort of idea just a few finished passes one two three so there's a few liftoffs in here to sand but otherwise it's nice and smooth and all those joints are well hidden now that this is dried overnight it's time to sand it so some people like to scrape their first coat some people like to sand it and I'm a sander so right here I've got some pretty coarse sandpaper this one is a hundred grit just to burn it down real quick I've just got a few little liftoffs in here I just need a quick push so that's good enough and it makes it really nice and flat just scrape out any niblets out of the corners before I start and this part of the joint honestly barely even needs to be sanded but there we go that's all it sinks when you put a nice smooth first coat on so time to get coating so I've mixed my mind a little bit runny err for this coat and I'm just gonna start the bottom here so it doesn't really matter how you get the mud on just matters how you take it off and how it looks after you take it off so make sure it's evenly spread right up into the corner right up into that corner okay so now we're back to these same principles so it's feather than mud and now when I'm doing this again I don't have a super firm head I'm not kind of wrestling with it into the corner it's loose so that it's more maneuverable feather that edge and then I'm gonna work my way up and what I'm doing as I'm doing this is I'm actually putting for the first pass the feather I put the pressure on the bottom of the blade like so and on all these next passes I'm actually just a little bit top-heavy you can see this line right here and I'm gonna go up into this corner again and I gonna go a little bit closer it's getting a lot smoother and I just need work here now that I'm gonna fix with my knife and also because there's a bunch of mud left over in the corner I'm gonna use the square edge of my knife to kind of pull that out and smooth it up so that looking nice and smooth now now let's get to the actual flat which is what you were watching this video for in the first place but flats tie into other parts of the wall all over the place so this is part of it so I'm using the same size trowel you can see the mud is as wide as my trowel so I'm actually gonna have to put two passes on for this one one up here a little bit just covering it by a couple inches one down here and now it's the same thing we're gonna feather this edge at the top and as I go into here I kind of lift up quickly so that I'm not gagging into this coat feather my edge down here and now I've got a finishing pass and it might take two or three to get it perfect but these ones I'm pressing a little bit tighter I'm not scraping everything off I want to leave some material on here to build it up and descend okay so I just need one little more touch there now it's looking good and I know what some of you guys are thinking you're gonna be thinking Ben it's a flat joint it only needs to be ten inches wide and I mostly agree with you but you know what when you use a trowel sometimes it gets just a little bit wider than you intended it's a tiny bit more sanding but I tell you these walls are gonna look really good when they're done so that's how I like to do my flat joints and the width of my joint can change a little bit depending on what size trowel I'm using and how much it needs to be built out but in general I like them to be kind of wider than some people but my coats are pretty thin so it ends being very flat very smooth and you're not going to find the joint when you're done so anyways thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter and be sure to check out the next video in this series which is how to code a butt joint with the hot control

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 200,540

Keywords: drywall, trowel, hawk, how to, repair, damage, fix, hole, wall, mud, tape, taping, inside corner, tutorial, glue, corner bead, plaster, bead, hotmud, DIY, how to tape drywall, beed, corner, construction, mesh, carpentry, ceiling

Id: 6dC3baHdoqU

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018