Make your Nail Holes VANISH

the mantle here is complete as you know if you follow along but at the same time it's not complete the install is complete but what are we going to do about all these holes well this is a perfect time to show you guys how I fill nail holes I'll show you some of the products I like to use some that I don't like to use and uh by the end of this video you'll have the information to eliminate these nail holes these are from uh 15 gauge nailer 18 gauge nailer pin nailer trim head screws spring clamps uh just dense throughout the installation process that happened to mill work you're going to have them whether it's paint grade or stain grade so how do you get rid of these holes I'm going to show you let's get into it now like anything having the right product is going to make a tremendous impact on your final results after paint so we are going to walk through some of these this isn't every wood filler on the market but it's a pretty broad range to cover the characteristics of pretty much every wood filler on the market let's start on the left here with these I'd put these two in the same category these are spackling these are not even made for wood fillers uh but people do use them on Woodwork and MDF I've used them on both and I do not recommend these they are just too soft they're lightweight and even though they say they do not shrink they tend to shrink and you end up seeing nail holes after the paint which is definitely not something you want we want to hide these nail holes and make them where they are invisible so stay away from these um pretty much at all cost I used used to use a lot of this back in the day and uh no longer do so next moving up to an actual wood filler another dap product this is plastic wood not the best wood filler claims that it's stainable that's uh to be debated I've not had great results with that and this one is in the natural finish definitely paintable I mean pretty much every filler is going to be paint grade but it is uh very hard I will give it that and it can be Tred and molded it looks acts like real wood as it says it is very good but it's not the best so if you're going to grab one of these at The Big Box store which is where you'll really get these two products three products really here U I would lean towards this plastic wood um but let's continue so here we have some Bondo products this is glazing and spot putty and you can see there it says for pinhole scratches and minor dings this is something that I would not use on my initial go around of feeling in nail holes I would use this for what it says for pin holes scratches and minor ding so I see a lot of professional painters using this you'll notice because it's red if you ever walked into a job site and just seen red dots all over all the mill work you know they're using Bondo glazing putty and they're usually doing that after the first coat of primer looking at things that they missed on the initial fill so don't use this for filling in nail holes it's not good it shrinks and it's going to drive you crazy so next up we have actual Bondo if you know anything about Bondo you know there's the actual Bondo in this court and then on top here you can see that little um container inside there that is the hardener so you mix the Bondo with the hardener and then you have like a minute to work with it so it's very inconvenient when you're going around filling na holes on a project you would have to be mixing this up like every 2 or 3 minutes and it's very very uncalled for for filling nail holes we use this mostly for repairs and you know if a molding is you know chipped away in a large section you can use this to shape it back out and you know recreate that molding but it's not something that I'd recommend for what we're trying to accomplish for just filling basic nail holes so Bondo does have its place and it is not fulfilling in nail holes so that brings us to our last filler that we have here and this one right now is my favorite wood filler this is called fam wood and they come in different uh finishes different sizes obviously as you can see here and these right here are the best wood fillers that I've ever used and they are extremely hard they dry within 10 to 15 minutes depending on the size of the filling that you're putting in if it's a big screw hole it might take a little bit longer but generally that 10 to 15 minute range is it's it's going to be completely dry and very hard so it'll be ready to sand down in in that time frame so this is the product that I highly recommend uh I get this at my local lumber yard I'm sure if it's on Amazon I'll put a link down in the description but this has been my go-to lately so that's what we're going to use to fill in these nail holes when you open this container you're going to find that the filler is extremely wet and it's kind of crazy because how hard it dries and and such a short amount of time but that's amazing because you pull it out and you can work with it and mold it and do anything you want with it and I just use my fingers I don't put on a glove or use a Bondo spreader or anything and once I have it loaded up on my fingers I'll just grab you know an amount about like that I'm just going to go across every nail hole that I see in every Ding and I'm going to push it into the hole so I'm going to initially push it in push it in I've got a little clamp Mark right there push it in and pushing it in make sure that you're feeling the hole in because what you don't want to happen is that you just put it on the surface like that and then when you go time to sand it off well now your hole is revealed or the sander if you're using something like a surf prep sander the vibration of that machine or any machine could shake out the filler because it's not touching the entire hole so just make sure you push it in all the way and get it pressed in there that's the main thing you want to emphasize so get it pressed in there do an initial round of pressing it in there looking for all holes so now that we have everything pushed into the initial holes I'm just going to go back and put a pretty good amount of excess right on top of the hole centered on the hole now the reason for this is that whenever we sand it down whatever we use sanding it by hand or an actual machine it is going to be able to knock it down flush to the surface of the material in this case this crown molding and this fascia piece so missed that hole there it's kind of hard to see with the camera in the way is that a hole back there might might be push that in and really we want to see excess filler on every hole so we've got this section filled in we'll start the clock right now and 15 minutes from now all this should be extremely hard and ready to sand missed a little bit right here too and up there now that I'm behind the camera I can see it so that looks pretty good so that's that's what I like to see right there like that That's Heavy excess right there but again this is going to pay off when you sand it down if you just put it on lightly I mean I've experienced it you're going to see the hole the whole point is not to see the hole there's another little ding right there so really got to come in with laser eyes and just look for every little Ding and imperfection and you're going to be failing those in so that is filling the nail holes right there so let's look at another defect right there this is a ding or dent and this could be from anything this could have came from the supplier from the lumber yard from me strapping it to my truck I don't know where that came from could have just got hit by something when I was spinning it around at the saw I don't know but the the fact that I do know it got dented somewhere and I need to fill it in so for something like that that's a minor ding I will just try to kind of float that out like that where I'm just going to leave it heavy and just Glide across it like that it can be it can be even that heavy there's a little bit of a ding right there too but I'm happy with that once that dries I'll be able to sand that down flush and you won't see it and it looks like this might have got dinged after the fact cuz there's another ding on this separate molding that's in the general location of that one but there's no tell and how it really got there so those minor dings I don't really you don't really have to push into it like you do on the nail holes and the screw holes um you just really need to kind of glaze over it so that will dry that's an extreme amount of excess but it doesn't really matter because I'm happy with the smoothness of how that looks once I sand this down and make it flush it will be like it wasn't even there there's some minor other things but that covers like 90% of what I'm running into here at least so with that we've got a lot of holes to fill here I'll just run a time lapse showing me fill these holes and with editing magic we'll catch up when it's time to sand so here's what we're looking like after that session of filling holes and some of these areas you'll notice have more than others like this area here doesn't have much on the left side of the pediment and the center pediment doesn't have much of anything it's because this isn't the first session of filling for some of this project I did fill in and prime a lot of this as I built it if you remember so let's go back down here all this stuff was newly filled as you saw at the beginning of the video and I'll show you what we'll do with it now so at this point I'm going to take me a piece of sandpaper here it's a small roll of 120 is what I like to start with I won't really go any lower than that 120 is enough to knock down this filler and you'll notice here this this has been an hour so this is plenty of time this stuff is rock hard now that's all extremely cured and ready to be sanded I have a surf prep sander but I'm not going to use that on the initial knockdown because if you know about surf prep I can sand this profile yes with a machine but it's going to take forever to get that knocked down and if I use a low grit on my sander then I'm going to knock down all these edges and sharp lines that I want to keep I'd rather just do this by hand so that's exactly what I'm going to [Music] do it's a really good wood filler so leaving that excess on and sanding it off allows us to have a perfectly flush surface here so I'm good with that I'm just knocking off the high points and the majority of the excess I'm not going to go too crazy cuz I will will come back with my sander and fine-tune it after that initial sanding by hand with 120 you can see the nail hole still yes you can see the different color um of where the hole was but you can also see that that hole is now flush with the surface of the material so this is where that sander comes in to clean up the excess and really just flatten everything to make it perfect it's a real light grit that I have here actually they don't even label it as a grit it's like a fine pad you can see here and then this is going to hug around that profile and really get into [Music] everything so that's extremely smooth right there and if I shoot that with some primer we should be able to see all those holes just [Music] disappear I did miss a little ding right here and that's the thing about this this isn't you're not going to do this in one try if you're going to fill stuff prime it you're going to see what you missed then you're going to go back or in some cases you don't even need to prime it to see what you miss but that's why as you're feeling you need to be really focused looking at everything to make sure that these things are not going to show up in your final top coat finish so I'm not going to do that right now I'm going to this isn't the final primer or anything I'm not going to fill that in so we're just going to Prime this section and see how we did so I'm going to prime it as I do on this with a rattle can of primer and I've got stuff just lightly plastick off cuz I don't want to Prime over unsanded filler that would be a nightmare so let's look at our first go around here so I'm going to let that dry and then prime it again if you prime too heavy with these they will just drip immediately so I usually give it like a minute or two to cure after that second coat of primer here is what we're looking like looks pretty dang solid for a first go around on this section of the mantle we might see some imperfection but that looks pretty good and then building coats with primer is another way to kind of make the Surface more uniform so I'll usually shoot two coats of primer one reveal coat which I would call this one this will show me any imperfections that I can fill again and then one final priming coat and then we move on to finishing paint work so yeah I'm just trying to get it in the light so you can see what's going on here maybe a couple little imperfections but that looks pretty good from where we started you remember this thing was shot and clamped and had little pin holes in it so for a first go around I'm pleased with that so that's one section it's going to be the exact same process for the rest of this and it's going to be a pretty long process look at what we're up against so hopefully that helps you guys on feeling nail holes that's my process let me know if you have any other tips and tricks down below but that's the result we're getting I think that will work for you guys as well so thanks for watching and I'll catch up with you when it's time to paint this thing

Channel: Finish Carpentry TV

Views: 205,672

Keywords: finish, carpentry, finishcarpentry, trim, work, trimwork

Id: 8P8auxelRBU

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024