How to Skim coat a wall FAST, with a NEW 24" Drywall Skim Coating blade. This is game changing.

hey today i'm going to show you how to use this level 5 24 inch wide skim coating blade to do skim coating butt joints big repairs and i'm going to show you all that and all about it right after this [Music] hey i recently picked up this level five skim coating blade and i've only had a few chances to use it but so far i love it there are a few drawbacks to it so i'm going to talk about those but i'm going to show you how to use this for several situations such as we're going to get rid of this ugly well actually this one isn't an ugly texture but it is the way i i did some samples in a previous video about how to spray orange peel texture so we're going to make all three of these samples go away using the skim coating blade and i'll tell you why you might want a skim coating blade i'll show you some or tell you about some other methods that you can do this and i'll try and explain how this blade works the features of it and so on and you can decide if this might be the blade for you hey unless you just happen to have a whole lot of this stuff sitting around and you just got money to burn then you probably want to save some money well one of the ways you can save money is by doing these kind of repairs yourself i've been doing drywall for about 35 years first walked on stilts when i was 8 years old so it's my goal to pass on my skills to you guys i'm gonna teach you in these videos how to do your own home improvement projects like drywall repairs skim coating texturing and many many more tasks and tricks and tips so if you like learning those kind of things and you want to save some money be sure and click on that subscribe button and if you click the little bell icon right after you click subscribe then you'll get notified each time we put out a video so you won't miss anything now on to this blade um this is there's several companies out there that make these this one happens to be made by level five and i've honestly waited quite a long time to bite because i debated on is it really necessary is it really going to benefit me it's kind of pricey it's around 90 i think it was but i finally bit the bullet and bought it because it really seemed like a valuable tool now that i've got it i'm glad i have i've used it twice now and both of them were on repairs so i had to float it out about three to four feet wide and this just really sped things up gave me a nice level smooth coat of mud and i'll show you those advantages here in a minute but first let me go over the design of it it's kind of interesting if you compare this to a normal blade well a normal blade like this is fixed nothing moves it's got a semi-rigid spine right here you can bend it but it's not meant to flex much and then the blade flexes a little but it's still fairly rigid well when we compare this first of all this is just a protecting uh shield so you don't ding up your blade well this consists of two parts this aluminum part right here that you grip and this is how you hold it and it's fairly rigid it's really not meant to bend at all then you have the flexible blade part and this blade you can see it's pretty wide you can actually replace these blades so if you were to damage it you just slide the blade out so i'm going to show you the blade so now with it out of there you can see this is pretty flexible it's actually way flexible but up against that rigid backing where it's riding right here it gives it a little bit of flexibility and a little bit of stiffness at the same time so that you get a nice flat surface when you're floating things out and that's what appealed to me the more i thought about it the more i thought you know this flexible nature here rigid backing right here this thing ought to make nice flat coats when you're trying to coat nice and wide this thing works really well but i just thought you know wider is better when we're floating these things out so you can get different widths of these down to narrow ones and i think they go up to three feet i believe i'll put links to these in the description down below so if you want to go check them out we do make a small commission if you purchase anything and that helps our channel grow it really i've used it a few times and honestly it feels really good when it's going over the surface it has a nice smooth feel you've got good control i actually like that you need to use two hands because sometimes you want just a little more pressure out here and the wider blade with just a knife would be a little bit harder to do that it's really a feel thing i would say now is it totally necessary no you can get by with these knives i've done that for 30 some years but now that i have it if you're gonna be a professional drywaller i think this thing would really benefit you because it can speed up certain tasks and you probably see my helper walking around here his name is sketch now as far as skim coating there's actually about three or four ways you can do it we're going to do it today with this but you can also roll the mud on with a paint roller and then smooth it out you could smooth it out with a knife you could smooth it out with this or smooth it out with a rubber trowel now they have these made just for drywall for you novices out there this is a pretty affordable way of getting a smooth finish if you're not very good with a knife so i'll leave a link to these in the description down below the other way to do it is simply spread it on with your knife and i'll kind of show you that because you have to do that to start with and you can get a pretty smooth finish that way i've done whole houses with nothing but a pan and a knife now i'll show you one more accessory that goes with this this is separate you'd have to buy this separately and i'm a little bit disappointed with this thing i'll tell you why in a second first how you install this i found is you just put it on here there's a center mark if you want to really center it but you just put it on here and snap it on now it is made to hook up to a paint pole but what i don't like is it won't hook up to just any old paint pole this is my favorite style of pole i just bought this these are really nice poles and the reason i like it is it's infinitely adjustable you can adjust it in any increment at all and it just locks in place you don't have to have the holes but now i can't use it on this because they want me to buy their special handle and i don't really agree with that you would now have to buy their special pole so if you're doing a lot of this it's a minor inconvenience but i really think they should have made it fit any old paint pole okay since we're using this for skim coating to do this skim coating what you would need to coat something this rough is a sand pole a way of sanding it and the blade and then your pan and knives to put it on so your basic mudding tools and i'll leave descriptions to where you can pick those up on amazon in the description down below and then of course we got this blade okay our objective here is to get a level five finish so it's probably going to take two coats now the first step is because of all this bumpiness on here you want to scrape it there's always going to be some little peaks that'll make your knife jump and chatter and you'll get the washboard look on here and it'll just mess up what you're trying to do so just get your blade and scrape the whole thing first and then we're going to sand it okay now the next step is you want to sand it you could probably probably get by without sanding it after you scrape it but i found that doing these two together gives me an even better chance of knocking down those last little peaks that that are sticking out so i like to use an 80 grit on a sand pole if you're a novice there's a sander called a radius sander so i can't show it to you today but here's a picture of it and this thing works great because this one's a little harder to use for amateurs because of the fact that it sometimes will want to flip like that the radius doesn't want to so check that out in the description down below just go over it once real quick knock down the final peaks and we're ready to move on [Music] okay now normally on something like this you're not gonna have that much dust so you probably don't need to dust it you can if you want to though okay the next step would be to put a solid coat of mud on this and float it all out but first what i'm going to do is i'm going to pretend like this is a butt joint right here we're going to coat that a little bit and then we'll go back to skim coating the whole thing because that's going to show the other use for this blade now whenever i'm skim coating or coating anything heavy i like to use the mud pretty thick so this is pretty close to straight out of the box it's probably thinned down a little bit okay let's say you just want to split this one like so so put a good coat on there now to use the skim coating blade i basically do the same thing as i would normally do coating a butt joint so i put it on pretty decent then i go ahead and feather the edges which means tilting your blade putting more pressure on the outside edge and then i'll usually depends on how this comes out it's on a ceiling right out in the open i'll feather the ends you can see it's going to cover pretty much the whole thing and i'm going to get more bubbles because i'm doing this over a painted surface it always bubbles more when you do that but the advantage is we have less lap marks so we basically have that one lap mark now if i did it with a knife you end up with two i'm going to take a little bit too much off but you always end up with one down the middle because you're using a 12 inch times two so that's your basic advantage on a butt joint is coating it wider sometimes you got to coat these really wide so let's just say let's just say you had to coat it that wide you could leave it i think you could leave it pretty sloppy like this we'll go ahead and feather and then we're just going to try and smooth all that out with this blade so in this case it's not going to cover the whole thing so let's just kind of do a split here putting more pressure on this outside edge and that's where that nice flexible blade comes in and it's got a slight hump there so i'm going to go over it one more time now i could just go right down the middle if i wanted to get that and then come back so i think it leaves a really pretty butt joint it's got a nice shape to it right off the bat for me it sped things up when i was doing my repair okay so now let's just continue before skim coating this we just first got to coat everything now i do like to when i'm skim coating i try and put the mud on fairly evenly to start so i i usually don't like to leave too much of this rough stuff so if you see me go over it a couple times i'm evening the mud out see right there i had a little light spot so if you can see that on camera it's a little light so what i did is i still got mud on here i just come down when i get close to that i can lay a little more mud on it and it goes away now it doesn't have to be super smooth at this point so the next step would be to just start smoothing it and whatever works for you you can run it sideways top to bottom i'm not even sure what i'm gonna do i left the mesh tape in there oh well now you'll notice on my my system here this is a brand new setup this is my brand new studio this is video number two one of the things i've done is made this accent light up here i can turn this on and off as i need to and if i really want it make everything stand out i turn off these other lights and you can see the defects even more you can probably see the bubbles over here this is the first time i've used this so i hope you can see these they stand out much better when you light across the surface like this all right now for a level five or smooth finish this is about all i would take it because i know that heavier texture to get it level five it's gonna take two coats anyway okay a little trick here little drywallers trick when you're coating wide stuff like this and you got these overlap marks you want to leave this lap mark that looks kind of like this versus i'm going to come over here to the edge and ruin this if you leave an edge where you're leaving a gouge type edge that's much harder to sand off the one where this edge is actually going up on top of that one i call it a lap mark when it does that all you got to sand off is that little peak right there it sands off easy if you do it this way you pretty much can't sand it off so the way you leave lap marks correctly is when you want the lap mark over there you put a slight more amount of pressure on the other side and then like when i did this one i put the more pressure on the bottom that pushed the lap mark to the middle i don't have any of those gouge type lap marks and it's gonna make your life a whole lot easier we're gonna let this dry overnight come back sand it do another coat okay i've let this dry overnight it's dried thoroughly so the first step for today is just to sand it now i would recommend you wear a mask if i wear a mask it's hard to talk but i'd recommend you wear one for safety [Music] if you start seeing texture coming through you may be going too far because you're going to have to recover that so you're trying to just smooth it out so we can do the next coat now i'm sanding with 80 grit so it's pretty aggressive and if you can see right here there's a lot of sanding scratches and that's okay at this step but i've basically leveled it out so now if you see it's still fairly rough there's some of the texture showing through right here the bumpiness and then there's all these sand scratch marks that i'm leaving and that's okay but we're trying to take off these lap marks like here now when you sand afterwards there's always going to be this little layer of dust on here so i recommend that you vacuum that off if you want you can go over it with a damp rag or a damp mop but be very gentle because it doesn't take anything to damage it with a wet rag so just go over it lightly so at this point we're basically ready to do the same thing again we're going to put another coat on i'm going to put it on pretty thin because i don't see much texture left to cover but you don't want it real thin at this point unless it came out really really good but i'm i know that there's still a few deeper things so i'm going to put a medium thin coat on so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right that's coated so now it's time to let that dry we're gonna put a fan on it come back sand it with some fine grit we'll probably go to 220 and this thing should be ready for texture almost ready for level five i'm gonna do a separate video continuation of this to show you how to do a level five okay this dried so on camera right now it probably looks really good and it's it's in pretty dang good shape this is smooth from top to bottom except there's one area can you see it it runs right down the middle where we overlapped it and that's why i created this upper lighting here so i can show it to you better this should make it stand out a little bit better and i'll show you a picture of it here and all that is is it's the area where the two overlapped so the one final step for a skim coating like this would be to sand it and then do minor touch up it doesn't have to be perfect depends on what kind of texture you're putting the heavier the texture the less work you got to do but we definitely want to get rid of that one for this step i have changed my sandpaper to a 220 grit because you don't want to leave those scratches like we did before make sure this is in good shape if you got any little torn edges wrinkles anything like that it will scratch right where that's at so so it's got to be a good piece of paper so i'm going to go ahead and sand that show you how to touch it up and show you the final result now here's a little sanding pointer you know we were trying to mainly sand out this middle area when you're sanding you want to make sure that if you are using anything that's rectangular or even square don't hold it straight like this hold it at an angle otherwise those straight lines tend to dig in and even if it's square hold it a little bit of an angle if it's round it doesn't matter but there's one more tip don't concentrate just right on one area back and forth move up and down a little bit so that you're kind of feathering out your sanding or you're gonna kind of dig yourself a valley in here so look more like this and that'll give you a lot better results so we'll go ahead and vacuum this okay so there you have it that is plenty smooth for any texture out there plenty nothing's going to show through that now if you want to leave this totally smooth this isn't really quite there it's close but if you do a large area you're still going to have some little defects you may still find a little pinhole here and there and i'm going to show you how to take it to level five there's kind of a few little tricks i'll do that in a separate video if you want to check that out but this is ready for texture but this could be left smooth if you don't want the absolute smoothest if you're willing to have a few minor defects this is going to look really good so i hope that helped you out if you like this video i'd appreciate it if you share it on your social media let others know and of course as always if you want to subscribe click the bell icon we'd appreciate that too more importantly i look forward to seeing you on the next video take care

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 160,498

Keywords: skimcoating, skim coating, skim coating walls, skim coating ceilings, skim coating over texture, skim coating over popcorn, skimcoating walls, skim coating blade, skim coating tool, how to skim coat, easy skim coating, that kilted guy

Id: yrYsGEIXOIg

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020