LIGHT MUD vs HEAVY MUD!!! (What's the difference?)

hello and welcome to Vancouver carpenter today we are gonna look at the difference between all-purpose light and heavyweight all-purpose how can this tiny bucket weigh so much more first a quick regional differentiation so in Western Canada we don't have heavyweight muds it's all light and so what that means is that the fillers like whatever sort of gypsum based fillers they use in there and maybe even the adhesive are light they're just they weigh less they're less dense whereas a heavy weight a traditional all-purpose has very heavy fillers in them causing the mud to be very hard and very dense there also seems to be a lot more adhesive in a mid weight or heavy weight all-purpose mud so in a lot of parts of the state there is no such thing as light weight taping mud in Canada especially Western Canada we use light weight taping mud I actually had to go out of my way to Canadian Tire to find this silly tiny bucket of heavy weight all-purpose it's the first time I've ever seen it anywhere in this region there is also a big difference in strength heavy weight all purposes drive really hard when you try and crack a crumb it's quite difficult to do but with the lightweight all-purpose when you take those crumbs they break really easily so there's a huge difference in strength which makes me wonder why would you tape with a mid weight all-purpose when they're actually so weak and brittle next let's get into what the stuff looks like in the box or bucket when you buy it typically conventional heavy weight muds actually have more water in the mix this is actually usable for taping like your basic taping needs basic hand taping it doesn't need to have a lot of water added to make it workable and that's pretty typical of box or bucket muds that I have found it's also really shiny and heavy like you can noticeably feel if you're used to lightweight muds and you pick this up you can feel there's a lot more mass on here and again it smells different it's shinier it's there's more glue it just seems more dense next let's get into a box of lightweight all-purpose this mud is typically much drier so it keeps its form a lot more in there you can see it it just it doesn't slot back in and look at just how porous and aerated it is like you can see it's just very different it feels lighter on the knife it's a very different product it doesn't smell as gluey it also takes a lot more water to mix it down enough to the point that it can be used look at this it's not slumping around it's kind of like a solid blob it's a lot more like the consistency of painters Bakkal I actually love using this stuff straight out of the box for doing wall repairs before paint like small dents and damage because it sands really easy compared to products like dry decks or other traditional painters spackle and it doesn't shrink much when you use it in this form now that we have a general idea of the difference of heavy weight all-purpose what are some of the pros and cons so some of the good things about heavyweight all-purpose is it's really good for taping super sticky super hard and durable finish it also says right on the bucket that it's good for skim coating however getting into some of the bad points it's really difficult to sand I know this from experience if you load it on for your first coat and it's a bit thick or you leave some stuff to sand on your finish coat you're gonna burn out your shoulders and elbows this stuff sucks to send one of the next cons obviously is that it's very heavy so carrying the buckets around really sucks it also gets really heavy in the pan in your hand it's easily 30% heavier which adds up a lot over time so your repetitive strain injuries are going to be a lot worse with this product than they are with the light stuff the fact that there's more glue makes it just seem to shrink more the glue has shrinking properties but overall I think heavy weight all-purpose is a great product and if we actually had heavyweight all-purpose in Canada this is what I would use for taping over a lightweight taping mud I just think it's a better product next let's get into the lightweight all-purpose so first off obviously it's light so less repetitive strain injuries it's also a little bit easier to push with a knife or a trowel you can just kind of feel that it's less sticky and a little bit more slick but not in a gluey slick more in like a light slick if that makes any sense next it's very easy to send which leads to one of the downsides it's very easy to scratch and next one of the other biggest downsides is it has much poor adhesion and it's just generally less durable than a heavyweight all-purpose so I don't even actually consider a lightweight all-purpose really an all-purpose if I'm in a pinch I'll tape with it but only if I have no other option the main benefit to this stuff is if you only want to carry around one bucket and you don't take very much and you just need some filler that sands easily but isn't so light that you can't tape with it then this is good stuff so it has its benefits too so the last thing I wanted to do was I wanted to do a tape test so I have here two tapes that were put on with all-purpose light we're gonna put on a tape with heavy weight all-purpose and tomorrow I'm gonna come and rip them off and see if I can notice any difference okay so I'm gonna use this stuff straight out of the bucket no fitting it down get a nice spread on here and now because I actually liked that sort of homeowner handy dude hack so much of wetting the paper tape before you apply it I did it again for using mud straight out of the bucket it actually worked really well if you guys watched that video that's installed now tomorrow we're gonna come back and we're gonna do a pull test to see how it went we're back so just a couple more quick notes about the old to usage in Fred I forgot to mention that it's also one of the ideal mods to coat steel or vinyl Corner beef for your first coat because the adhesion is so good now after all that I'm pretty inexperienced with this mud but I was using it today and my first impressions after not using it for a long time are it's heavy sticky hard to work with doesn't spread nicely very bubbly so in general it's a pain to work with and while if I use this exclusively I may leave a harder better finish for my customers walls it's also going to be much more painful for me to use it's gonna take longer because it shrinks more and doesn't leave as nice a finish so I would have to charge accordingly to use this stuff and I think the market is built around using muds that are easier to use even though they're garbage and fall apart now let's get you guys a little closer and rip these tapes off let's start with one of the all-purpose that I did in a video a long time ago okay yeah it left some stuff on shall we get an up-close look no no let's do that in a minute let's do the other all-purpose that's working pretty good this is also still the light now what was the difference this was the one that I did with the water method like the handyman homeowner water method and this was the one that I did with just regular all-purpose mod not doing the hand method and it's sticking better so that's something to know adding water to the tape makes it not stick quite as well as when you use just properly thin down drywall mud let's take a look at that there's the first one and it really pulled off pretty cleanly until about here and I could still get that off though so came off pretty easy and then there's the one that I used mud without the wet tape and that really left a lot of the tape on there so that one had better adhesion now let's try this one the all-purpose with water on the tape if this comes off easy we're gonna have to do another test now I thought this video was over yeah I came off really easy hmm I think we should do an all-purpose without adding water to the tape okay here we go just heavyweight all-purpose with no water added to the tape and this is just straight on the bucket so it's not thinned down either I suspected that adding water to the tape might actually reduce the adhesion and the reason I thought it might reduce the adhesion is instead of the glue saturating the tape you've got water saturating the tape so the glue doesn't really have as good a chance to sink its teeth into the paper tape whereas this one the all-purpose light you know that was a really good result like I actually think that's acceptable like I would take with all purpose light more often now after seeing that okay the other thing I'm going to do here is I'm gonna give this a little bit of time to let the glue saturate into the tape I'm not just gonna wipe it out right away you're just gonna kind of hang out check my Instagram you know hang out how you doing all right so that's been about a minute and now gonna start pulling this thick sticky mud out come under this tape ha wrinkles oh man where's that wet tape huh well doesn't have to be perfect I need to let the perfectionism go this is an adhesion test not a real joint okay there's still lots of mud under that tape I can feel the tape is kind of wet and saturating let's check on that tomorrow time for our final tape pull test let's see how it does that's really good what you guys can't see maybe you can is it's actually just pulling the tape right in half so I actually can't get all this stuff off try from the other side if I can even get it hold on it yeah okay this definitely works well okay all-purpose heavy wait for the win completely ripped the tape in half lengthways whereas here we have all-purpose mid it was definitely better and then we've got all-purpose heavyweight with water all-purpose light with water so what does that tell you guys maybe don't do that home owner trick anymore the bond is not as good as you think well I am impressed with how well that heavyweight all-purpose works like I said you guys I think it's just a better product than light months all together except for the finishing stages better for the customer harder for me anyways I hope you guys got something useful out of this video thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter hope your projects going well hope yes thing to do I mean you don't just watch videos all day do you okay moving on I mean moving on to like turning off your computer by I need it go build something

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 235,643

Rating: 4.9343519 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, repair, fix, hole, wall, best, fast, easy, patch, plaster, tape, taping, mudding, mud, joint, compound, joint compound, mesh tape, setting, quickset, DIY, finish, topping, paper tape, gypsum, wallboard, different, types, corner, inside, outside, trowel, knife, drywall finishing, plastering, taper, mudder

Id: XB0T0MEvTEg

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019