Taping and Mudding 101 (How to feather an edge)

hello and welcome to Vancouver carpenter so this video is really dry while finishing 101 how to feather an edge because if you're not able to feather an edge you're gonna be doing a lot more sanding than you need to and as most of us have experienced sanding really is the least pleasurable part of doing this job so first off what is feathering an edge feathering an edge is just simply getting rid of these hard lines by bending your knife so what you're doing is you're putting a lot of pressure you're bending the blade and what that does is it completely gets rid of that edge and leaves an almost imperceptible edge on there there really isn't anything to sand on that one spot we'll do the next one and I've also left a nice little lift off right in the middle there so that's what feathering and edges it's actually really simple it's really easy to do however it is something that people might struggle with and there's two reasons that you might be struggling with feathering an edge one is maybe you're learning how to use a trowel so it's a lot harder to bend a trowel and feather that edge especially the bottom one that's the hardest one for people and the bigger the trowel the harder it is to feather that edge so if I'm using a 16 inch trowel it takes considerably more pressure to actually feather that edge and oftentimes you can see that there is a slight hard edge there not like the one that I showed you on film but a little bit more sanding than you should be having to do again the first reason you may be experiencing unfeathered edges is just lack of experience with the tools you really want to learn how to bend that blade and it's about speed right so you get some material on there and then you bend the blade feather that edge actually another reason I just remembered is if your tools are really old and worn out they don't feather as easily a newer knife with a more squared edged feather is much easier so you could actually file the ends of your knives like mine start to get pretty old in fact they get really sharp because they get totally polished and burnished from the paper and the gypsum it's like a burnishing compound and they get sharp like I've actually sliced myself on these so you could take a file and wear that away square and that would help however having a nicely rounded over edge is actually really good for skimming your final coat it compresses the mud gently and nicely and leaves a really nice smooth skin coat where as a really square edge will actually kind of pull and tear a skim coat I find really the only benefit to having a square edge on your tool is just the feathering and if you just increase the angle a little bit that you're feathering up a worn down blade works just fine I've actually never spent much time sharpening my blades so the next reason and probably the most common reason that you're getting unfeathered edges is actually the mud getting too much time on the wall so let's say you got to finish your flat joint and it takes you a lot longer to apply the mud and how quickly I'm able to do it okay so let's leave this mud on here for maybe two minutes and I'm going to come back and try and feather the edge and see what happens so I just spent a couple minutes browsing Instagram all right let's try and feather these edges so there's the one I did earlier which is pretty nice now let's take a look at this one it's built up jagged and not anywhere near is nice even that it's got a lip on it for sure so that's an extra couple of passes with a sanding pole there's a couple ways you can fix this so this one that's already on the wall well what I'm going to do is I'm going to just really quickly put a bit more mud on that edge right there same with down here just very quickly spreading some mud there and now I'm actually just going to really quickly feather it with my nice and now I'm going to finish this joint so the reason that those hard hedges happened is when the mud sits on the board for too long the dry will start sucking the moisture out of it and then therefore you so you've already got the kind of dry hard edge there so when you try and feather it you can't push the material because it's dry so what I did there was I just applied a little bit more mud really quick and it kind of reactivates it and then feathered my edge again so now you can see it's much improved much better that's how you can get rid of those and also if you've already coated it and it's dry the other thing you can do is you can again just do that sideswipe over top of the hard edge and wipe it tight and what that's gonna do is just fill it in so there's less sanding so it's up to you you can either sand more or you can fill in that unfeathered edge with a new feathered edge lastly let's get into how to avoid those in the first place so let's say you are slow in applying mud and you've got a lot to cover and maybe it's a tricky joint so it's something that's requiring you to mess around a lot so instead of just leaving this what you can do is you can feather your edge right away and then you can keep loading the mud onto the rest of the surrounding area because you can kind of rest easy knowing that your edge is feathered and that way it won't form at all I hope this video clarifies what a feathered edge is how to get them and how to fix them if they are not working out for you so anyways thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter I hope you found this video useful if you want to support the channel do all those like subscribe things you know and helps the channel grow and I can make more videos for you guys till the next one hope your projects going well

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 659,389

Rating: 4.9430032 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, repair, patch, hole, wall, ceiling, damage, wallboard, sheetrock, gyproc, tape, mud, taping, mudding, good, best, fast, easy, smooth, texture, fix, paint, painting, trim, corner, inside, outside, bead, corner bead, DIY, home repair, carpententry, tutorial, plaster

Id: GIvmfBuAQIw

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019