PRE-FILLING DRYWALL (HOW TO PREVENT CRACKS)

hi my name is ben from vancouver carpenter and today i'm gonna teach you how to pre-fill your joints before taping drywall with paper tape first off what is pre-fill pre-filling is what I do to all butt joints and any gaps in the drywall prior to taping so what's a butt joint a butt joint is where the two factory ends of the drywall meet like this a factory joint is where the two recessed edges of the panel meet and so you have a gap to fill there so that makes a nice flat joint and then you have inside angles anywhere you have the 90-degree intersection of an inside corner so with the recessed joints the flat joints as we call them because they wind up flat when you finish coating them I don't usually do any pre-fill on those unless the gap is over an eighth of an inch however sometimes with 5/8 drywall it does require a pre fill so let's take a quick look at one of those on this 5/8 drywall for example the factory edge is so round that it actually creates a gap that needs to be filled when pre filling the recessed joints you want to make sure that you're not actually filling in the recess it's just a little crease left from the rounded over five days you can use a knife or a trowel in this case I'm using taping life you can use taping or all-purpose to do this or quickstep if you're good with it but I recommend using something you could sand easily if you're a novice so now when I take this off I'm going to be pushing really hard and making sure to get all that extra stuff out of there so as you can see the indent is filled but I've left the recess hallo so there's room for tape next let's get into the butt joints so these I actually like to carve a small recess into the moat with a sharp knife I just cut a very small chamfer on each side you need a nice sharp knife to do this now let's take a closer look at that as you can see I've put a little 45 on each one just a very small one and you want to get loose material out the reason I do this is I like to make sure that there is mud in the joint I have fixed so many cracks over my career and almost every single time the reason is there is not mud in the joint there's a variety of other small reasons like wrong type of mud wrong type of tape poor drying conditions but the number one reason is there is not mud behind the tape so I really like to seal the joint shut some people like to butt the boards together super tight when they're hanging drywall and in a perfect world I would actually have a little 1/8 gap on every single butt joint because that way I can ensure that I'm getting mud in that joint the next step is I'm going to pre fill this thing and I'm gonna be pushing pretty hard to really make sure that's full and then just so I've taken all the material off and only left what I needed to pre-fill I admit this seems like a lot of extra work but when I'm doing really high-end drywall jobs and I want to make sure I'm not coming back for any callbacks I do this on every single butt joint and next we have inside corners I always pre fill those as well there's a big empty inside corner so now I'm gonna do the same thing on these trying to make sure I don't leave any mess in the corner that'll get in the way when I'm taping and this is where I find the trial really helpful is forcing it into the inside corners so as you can see I've filled the corners I'm not too worried about this little bit here that's gonna get filled in when I'm taping but what this does is it stops the tape from being able to shrink and crack so the last thing that needs to be prefilled is any damage board that got damaged in transport or while hanging it here's some good examples up here right there and then we've got some big gaps from the hanging now this gaps so big that I would use quick set because quick-set won't shrink and I would also use quick set on this because with the really large gaps the air drying mud-like taping or all-purpose takes forever to dry so with quick set it's not gonna dry quicker but it's gonna set up and not shrink so that's a very basic rundown on what I like to do with pre-fill before taping with paper tape and now that you know what you need to do for your basic prep work I hope there's some happy taping ahead

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 514,840

Rating: 4.9086657 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, taping, filling, tutorial, DIY, mud, mudding, easy, fast, best, easiest, crack, prevent, paper, tape, mesh, professional, pro

Id: yEvfW4gYKYw

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017