HAWK AND TROWEL VS PAN AND KNIFE

hello and welcome to Vancouver carpenter today is Hawk and trowel versus pan and knife and what are the benefits and the disadvantages to each one first a really quick history lesson as to how each of these came about and they said just hearsay that I've gotten from hours and hours of reading construction and drywall forums but trowels are a plasterers tool so apparently what happened down in the states is the plasters went into the stucco trades and apparently the painters union is the one that developed the drywall finishing trade when they were switching from plaster into drywall so the painters took over that one and I think they just took their putty knives and just kind of grew their putty knives and then some dude probably brought in his wife's bread pen and started dipping his knife into it hence we have the pan next let's talk about volume which one holds more so I'm gonna scoop as many as I like to comfortably work with into here one two [Music] three and that's actually comfortable but if I really wanted to be a hero I could probably get four in there now that's hurting my wrist and I don't like it but can I get that onto the hog so that's not actually too bad that's a reasonably manageable amount as long as I'm getting it off of the hock and onto the wall quickly enough I can still kind of manage it I'm gonna make a bit of a mess but I can still manipulate it enough to keep it on there so volume I'd say they both hold about the same thank you for the sound effects next let's get into blade size and which one is easier to use so this is a 12 inch trowel and this is a 12 inch knife and I personally find once I get blades up to this size I actually find a trowel a lot easier to use and the simplest way for me to explain it is using a trowel is like rear-wheel-drive you've always got your muscle behind the blade you're always forcing it so even when I'm pulling my hand is still behind the mud that it's pushing now let's take a quick look at that so as I'm pushing the mud even going this way I'm pushing it or if I switch sides again I'm pushing the mud even when going up the force is still behind the mud so the obvious conclusion here is that this one is like front-wheel drive because you're always pulling the mud down going up I'm always dragging the mud and I can't get my mud as far before it starts to do this now I haven't been doing a very good job got it to about there before it really started to fizzle out so I can actually go the whole length of it pretty easily before it starts to you know and that I just ran out of mud so one thing that knives are actually better for though is feathering an edge it's much more intuitive and easy in fact using a knife is much more intuitive and user-friendly to begin with but for feathering this edge right I'm just pushing on the blade and pull it really nicely feathered that was really easy trowel is on the other hand are not as beginner-friendly and they take more effort to feather the edge it's still no problem but it's not as easy and you won't even have the muscles to do it yet if you haven't been practicing with these so while you can apply a lot of material with a pen and knife I do find that I personally can apply a lot more faster with a hawk and trowel and also with a lot less effort another thing that I really like about a hawk and trowel is how easy it is to place mud on the blade where you want it so I can very easily just adjust my mud have a nice tidy little pile there and then just pick it up and get it right in the center so that when I'm going for that spread it doesn't spill over the edges a pen and knife on the other hand I have a harder time not having it going from end to end of the blade and what tends to happen when you're doing that is it sort of spills out over the edges which on a wall isn't going to be a problem so when applying mud to the ceiling with the pen and knifes yeah I'm already spilling it on myself but I've often found it's really hard to not get all those blobs falling off the edge of your knife now I've tried a few different things like I've tried to have my mud tidally collected in the bottom there but I still just always seem to get it like this and this is one of the reasons you know what this stuff tastes like it's chalk but that's one of the reasons why I like a hot control better because I have a harder time skimming off my ceilings and doing all that stuff and not making a mess and getting globs and mud on the face I'm sure there's a lot of guys that can really proficiently use a pan and knife on ceilings but I'm not one of them because I've always done this but I just find this a lot easier right placed right in the middle of the blade and I still make a little mess but it's not as often well people hypocrite of the Year award right guys either way I find it a little faster now one thing I haven't mentioned is that's more pertinent to the hawk than the fact that it's a knife there is a third type of mysterious taper the hawk and knife taper so you can still get the same benefits by using a hawk right there's the mud right where I want it but man I'm getting carpal tunnel just doing this and I can't get a spray this far it's just simply not the same also it doesn't seem to work as nicely on here it's harder to tidy your mud up and keep it clean as you can see the advantages for me to using a trowel is moving lots of material quickly and the other thing is I can also easily go up in trowel size so I've got 14 16 and 20-inch trowels and they're all pretty effective the 20 inch gets hard to not have it wobble but I use that for filling in between corner beads or for floating out like big for foot joints very effective knives on the other hand I don't like them even up to 12 inch this 10 inch is as big as I like to use okay so we've talked about the downsides to pan a knife but there's actually a lot of upsides to so what about taping can you tape with a hawk and a trowel well you actually can I've seen it so what you guys should do is check out Laurier Desormeaux I think I said his name right french-canadian guy tapes with a hawk and a trowel and he's amazing with it and you're gonna get a ton of really good trowel skills from his videos if you check him out I'll link it in the description but he actually tapes with a hawk and at all except for corners where he uses a knife he does a good job but I don't think it's the most effective method personally so let's tape with this thing alright we're gonna get a little blob mud put it along that's a big swath of mud a little more than I need it for this paper tape it's working but just like how the knife felt awkward going too big this feels awkward trying to do a smaller tools job now it's left a nice amount of mud under the tape maybe a bit too much but it's still it's done a nice job now let's tape with a pen and a knife working out alright so I would say though that especially when applying the right amount of mud the pan and the knife worked a lot better so another thing is it can be kind of hard to hold a hawk full of mud and apply the tape at the same time so you have to put it down find somewhere to rest it but with this what you can do is quite easily just go like that so I do that all the time when taping which is why I would have mud so for small jobs a knife is gonna work a lot better so there's other things that a knife is gonna work way better for a trowel too likes a coating the corner right I can easily coat that corner with my knife and I can get my knife into tight little spots easily without getting my knuckles into the corner with trowels if you're not careful you can easily knuckle into the corner and also I mean you really you can't coat a corner with the trowel thank you it just doesn't work and I would have destroyed this other side if there was mud on it so if you've been wondering which tool is better Hawken trowel or pan and knife I would say they are both awesome at different jobs and I wouldn't be without either one of them I love the trials for bigger jobs I love the knives for smaller jobs anyways thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter I hope you found this video useful be sure to check out the channel regularly yeah I'm always putting out more videos thanks for watching I don't know how to close this video oh yeah throw the knife not this one this one [Music] thanks for watching

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 475,705

Rating: 4.9028897 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, trowel, hawk, pan, knife, taping, mudding, finishing, best, easy, fast, tape, mud, how to tape drywall, DIY, spackle

Id: -PTknIkIj64

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 01 2019