How to Apply Silicone - the COMPLETE Pro Guide

everyone thinks silicon is hard to do but in today's video I'm going to show you how with the right tools you realize that it really isn't in this video you'll find a comprehensive list of the do's and the don'ts so by the end of the video you will have everything you need to know and you'll know all the tools that you need to buy its a silicon like a true Pro [Applause] silicon can be a bit of a mindful we lost competing views on how it should and shouldn't be done that's why I've got my list of do's and don'ts and at the end of the video I'm going to be reseller cutting of my shower area with all this uneven tiles corners and transverse joints so you get to see just how easy is to do even and quite tricky area like this so let's have a look at the tools featured in today's video we've got this ever burl sealant stripout tool and got a Stanley knife and a scraper here and to decrease to join we've got some methylated spirits we've then got the silicon applicator gun here two different forms of silicon clear silicon seven eight one from Dow Corning and mapa sill which is a colored silicon available in lots of different colors great when you're trying to match the silicon to the grout and last but not least nice important thing in the kit this Fuji kit silicone profiling tool from Kramer full details of all today's tools will be available in the description at the end of the video let's demonstrate my list of things that you should avoid doing when you're suffocating I've prepared this handy little mock-up here so I'm saying don't use tape don't use your finger don't shape silicon and a concave profile don't use water and detergent don't cut the nozzle really small at 45 degrees or pull the nozzle along the joint and if you can although this isn't completely essential try not to cover all three sides of the joint now these little tips might surprise a lot of you out there certainly surprised me when I went from a sort of amateur DIY silicone ax in my teens to having fully researched that process and come up with the best possible solution for doing it so let's have a look at what you shouldn't do in practice so when I first saw the silicon I used to get some electrical tape like this and I would put it around the joint I thought this was absolute genius because guaranteeing me a really straight edge I then cut the nozzle really small like this at 45 degrees my thinking being it gave you a much tighter neater bead and then I'd apply silicon into the joint like this pulling the silicon along the joint as I went and then take my finger smooth the silicone along the insulating tape like this and then I'd peel off the tape leaving what appears to be a beautiful clean joint right there are a number of problems with this technique the first one is although you've got a nice clean line along here you've immediately got a point almost like a lip here a step where you get bacteria forming and once you get bacteria forming that is a breeding ground for mildew dirt and a soap and it won't be long before you have to replace this silicon bead that's point one point two by using your finger again your finger is a source of bacteria which again is going to lead to mold and mildew forming on the silicon the third problem with using your finger or any forming tool that has a concave profile like this is that you're creating a very very thin weak bead of silicon now if I show you on this side profile here the bead itself is almost non-existent it's not going to take much flexing of that joint as can happen for the silicon to crack point to when somebody cleans this joint very quickly this very micro thin layer of silicon is going to start being scratched away and the silicon set you can rub this thin bead really easily and it'll start to come away from the surface as I'll be showing you later in the video with a diagonal joint or even a convex joint you're creating a bead of silicon that is over eight times stronger than this very thin join you've got here by drawing the silicon or pulling it along the joint as I'm doing here you're not forcing it into the joint and you're giving the silicon an opportunity to form gaps between the side of the joint and the silicone now this joint I've just done here which hasn't been told yet it looks pretty good but you can see a little bit of a gap there and it may be you're restricted behind a tap or something so you can't get that and you might end up sort of producing an effect similar to this here now you see there I mean that's a very obvious gap you've also got these gaps all the way along the bead of silicon now typically when I produce to be the silicon in the past I've taken my finger or a forming tool and smoothed it almost straight away and in this situation you're going to be closing off most of those gaps so you've not really got too much of a problem well they'll be showing you later on in the video a much better way to apply the silicon into that joint such that you don't get those gaps but this is where my video becomes a little bit controversial a lot of trade pros out there use a water detergent mix as a tooling agent and they apply it at this point before they've actually smooth the silicon I had a guy commenting on my last silicon video and he got very angry and said I was a complete amateur because I wasn't using this water detergent mix my point is this the whole point of this water and detergent mix is Charybdis creates a slippery greasy surface that the silicon can't grab onto so in our example here I'm going to spray the bead as rotten wood and we've now created a surface that's so slippery look silicon just doesn't form on it matter how much you try you cannot get the silicon to stick why does silicon has use this mix because it makes tooling the silicon really easy for them once they've applied the bead look here you've just seen how slippery the surface is and now all of this detergent and water has gone behind those gaps that I showed you in the silicon bead a minute ago so now when we smooth this bead even though it might on the face of it look ok there for example you can see what a potential nightmare we've already got happening here we've got very obvious gaps here behind the silicon bead and that joint is going to be absolutely hopeless and it's going to start leaking almost immediately now my last point in this section of things not to do is not quite so important but these - wisdom on this is that you shouldn't really cover all three corners of the joint with silicon now the reason for this is that if your joints have got a bit of movement in them and possibly you're using a high modulus ie a stiff silicon then by Dearing's are all three sides of the joint if there's any movement the silicon can start tearing pretty easily but out of all the tips are giving you this section this is the one I would say I'm less worried about because you may not have a lot of movement in your joints and it's more relevant really where and as you see in some joints there's a gap here between the wall and the shower tray or whatever it is in which case you often see a foam filler piece being applied and where you do that it's much easier just to have it there doing to say to two sides of the joint there and there not so easy to do that where like here in my situation you've got nice clean joint with no gaps underneath it but you know if you are worried about this then you could select a low modulus silicon which is a more flexible silicon which will be much more accommodating and flexible if there is a bit of movement between your walls and say your shower tray I know we're seven hot minutes into the video I hope I've still got you all because this is the really cool bit now where I unveil my 12 golden tips for achieving the perfect silicon joint okay I'm going to go through each my twelve golden rules in turn and don't worry if you don't catch them first off because they'll be repeated in the description at the end of this video now clearly the first rule of silicon is to make sure your joints were well prepared by which I mean excess silicon has been removed and the joint has been properly degrease then you firstly with removal of existing silicon extent you've got to do that I find these stanley blades inserted onto a scraper like this particularly useful you feel a little bit uncomfortable using a scraper like this there are other tools in the market such as this which is designed to help you scrape silicon after the joint for the sake of completeness I should also mention that there are a lot of sealant removers on the market I'd actually feature a silicon remover in this video but I'll post some details of examples in the description at the end of the video now I've seen a lot of people on forums saying can i silicone over existing silicon and the officers are pretty mixed you know some people say yes of course you can't say we will say Kaushik on you're gonna remove all the silicones do a proper job now my advice on this generally is where you can I would remove the existing silicon however if like me in your bathroom you've got pretty clean joints like this where the silicone has actually been piped into a gap between the tile and the shower tray so it's not really that proud of the surface and you can get a bead on top of it pretty well I wouldn't worry too much about removing the silicon I thought we better move this silicon partly cuz I've got an acrylic shower tray so it's going to damage it if I start scraping away in silicone but also because the silicone has as I say big pipe so well into the joint it's not necessary to remove it now in terms of silicon leaning onto existing silicon there's two points to make here point one as I said in the previous section of this video you don't actually want the silicon to knit onto all three corners of the joint you only really want about two three millimeters on the side and then two or three millimeters on the base provided your new silicon joint has that crucial 2 to 3 meter bond on the side and on the base of whatever your silicon into if it hasn't bothered to the silicon in the middle it's doing you a bit of a favor because it's less likely to tear should you have a little flexibility in your joints but a little bit of advice for you here if you want to do something and you can't find any examples on forums about whether it works or it doesn't try it out for yourself see what happens here's what I mean so I was intrigued to know whether you can silicon onto existing silicon so that's exactly what I've done here as you can see now here the silicon is dried onto the existing silicon and I'm now going to try and remove it so I can show you how well it did as you can see we've got a really good bond there I'm probably gonna do a separate video on this but this one main point very quickly to you this silicon the existing silicon bead here has been in the shower for about a year and a half I haven't really decreased this particularly well I've just given it quick clean and I cannot scrape off the new silicon from that existing silicon bead so for those of you out there who want to know whether you can or can't silicon try it out yourself and in my case the answer is a pretty categorical yes you can degreasing as i've said and you can use acetone or methylated spirits to degrease I personally have chosen methyl is first I think it's more readily available than acetone and it's a less abrasive degreasing agent the good thing about over these degreasing agent is you apply it to the joint you know it's really beautifully degrease that joint and then methylated spirits evaporates off leaving you a perfect surface to silicone onto goal number two make sure you buy the right silicon for your this is often overlooked at this point people just go by any old cue silicon-silicon is generally categorized like this one as medium stretch high modulus these silicones are basically quite rigid and inflexible these are good for joints that you don't think can have a lot of movement where you're going to be cleaning them and you want them to be tough to withstand the cleaning the low modulus silicon is a much more flexible silica which would be really appropriate for example around a bath you may have heard the old trick that when you're sealing around a bath you should fill the bath with water for your silicon because the bath naturally sags down a bit with the weight of the water in it if for example it's on a wooden floor if you don't do that chances are when you run the bath the silicones going to flex and if it's a very inflexible high modulus silicone you might find it tears and then you get the water coming so it's a quick and simple point but one you must observe go on will number three go and buy yourself one of these it's a Fuji kit from Kramer it's a silicone profiling tool 12 pounds roughly $15 you can't go wrong I think this is one of the best profiling tools on the market now the brilliant thing about these little tools is a releasing agent the water and detergent that we talked about a few moments ago is not necessary don't take my word for it it's here in the instructions itself you can throw this away there's lots of variations on the market but this one comes in this handy little kit just having a quick look at some of the tools we've got here this is the original Fuji you've got four angles around the edge large concave angle there and you've got sixteen ten millimeters and a 90 degree angle there you then got the ability to make smaller beads here and there's a cunning little tool here for transverse joints that I'll be showing you shortly this little tool here is great for getting into restricted spaces like taps and finally we've got this Fuji 2 tool here which is fantastic because you put this attachment on it for getting across tricky transverse joints whilst maintaining a continuous speed [Music] [Music] and just look at the strength of this diagonal joint compared with the concave joint I did earlier with some electrical tape of my finger so I'm now going to run through golden rules for 212 as I tackle the really cunning of my shower okay so we know perfect silicon profiling tool we know it'll work out what size angle to use and you do that by going around the bathroom or whatever is your silicon and look for the biggest gap you've got and then select the smallest tool for that gap plus two three millimeters each side so here in my bathroom I'm gonna use the Fuji two tool because I've got these transverse joints to negotiate here here is a slightly troublesome joint I've got here where there's been a bit of water leaking out and it's between the eight and the 10 millimeter tool I'm gonna go with a ten millimeter to be absolutely sure I get a really good joint now this is where in my video I depart from what you're often told to do on silicon instruction videos I chosen the 10 millimeter profiling tool and I'm gonna cut the silicon nozzle to 10 millimeters ie the exact width and the profile this means that the B that I'm applying to the joint pretty much matches the profiling tool the other thing I'm gonna do here which is a bit this pretty surprising is I'm cutting the nozzle at 90 degrees not 45 degrees as you would typically expect cutting the nozzle to the same diameter as the profiling tool means that the bead that comes out the silicon is compatible with the profiling tool so there's not gonna be too much wastage but also cutting the nozzle 90 degrees means that we are encouraging ourselves to force the silicon into the joint rather than pulling or dragging which is what you're more inclined to do if the nozzles cut at 45 degrees so you've got doing like this I'm forcing the silicon into the joint that way I know there won't be any gaps now the other thing about this tool is it encouraged you're encouraged to work in short sections as you pull the tool along you want to make sure that you're keeping the tool in contact with wall on both sides and then to the extent you can see a little bit of access Serkan like here you can just go back over the area removing the excess silicon gonna be using the gray sealant along this joint so what I've done here as I'm just smoothing with this tool round the corner working out from both edges away from the vertical joint just so brilliant is talked if you got any excess like I've got that you can simply just wipe it away knowing you for the special attachment this time I'm just going to use the original Fuji working in short sections because you simply don't need to do the whole run in one go now I was going to trim around the corner to get that lovely clean edge [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I really found this video useful my advice to you if you've got your own silicon and job to do is go and buy one of these kits and get practicing practice makes perfect and the beautiful thing about these tools is you can have a bit of a go and if you're not completely pleased with a finish you've got you can just scrape it off and start again so great to get your comments or questions over them in this video and if you're new to my channel I'd love to have you subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 3,109,704

Rating: 4.7934632 out of 5

Keywords: how to apply silicone the complete pro guide, cramer, fugi kit, silicone profiling tool, complete guide, step by step instructions, everything you need to know about silicone, everbuild sealant strip out tool, stanley knife, mapesil AC silicone, dow corning 781 clear silicone, professional silicone tools

Id: _DI4hfHM_Hg

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2017