Which Caulk or Sealant Adhesive Do You Need?

stuff in tubes stuff in tubes is this kind of thing we all know these mastics fillers caulking all kinds of things you get yourself a gun and i would suggest you get yourself a good gun because the cheap ones are horrible to use maybe something like a cox gun well worth the investment when you go into a merchants or a diy store or wherever you go you're treated to a vast range of different products all in tubes all looking lovely and if you're anything like me bit of a skin flint basically you look at these tubes and you'll go price price price bit like buying a bottle of wine in a restaurant your price price price where's the cheap stuff now the cheap stuff is 99p a tube and it's called decorators caulk and it's an acrylic based product that's useful for filling in around skirtings architraves all that kind of thing where things are a bit gappy just before you paint beautiful product can be over painted and you can actually use it outside as well if you paint it but it's not great outside so really cheap product that's good for those jobs stick to using it inside you'll be fine actually within that range there are some which were a little bit better the dunlop one i found it's got a little bit more elasticity and it will allow for a little bit more movement whereas some of the others can just tear apart if things start to move too much but hopefully things don't start to move too much so that's the first one we're talking about is the decorator's cork you want to move outside you want to do something a little bit more demanding maybe a ceiling around window frames and things like that so here you've got a choice between silicon and hybrid polymers now if you use a silicon people tend to think that silicones is the go-to product for sealing everything up wonderful product but you've got a division within the silicons and you've got neutral curing and you also got the stuff with acetic acid acetol in it which is basically the stuff which smells a little bit more you know really quite punch a bit more than vinegar i'd say but anyway you know as soon as you use it you get that smell goes in your eyes slightly a little bit irritating but it does the job that acetic acid is a wonderful product it's good for doing certain ceiling jobs but what it isn't good for is using on things like stone natural stone metal and even pvc frames so if you've got double glazing you want to go around and seal all that the stuff with the acetic acid in is not great for doing that the other subdivision here so we've got acetoxy and we've also got neutral curing a neutral curing is the other product that is suitable for use on stone because basically instead of having that acid toxin inside it and giving off acetic acid it just gives off kind of alcohol you won't smell it and it doesn't attack those various things like around say if you put putting the nice trimming around the shower maybe it's a bit of chrome or something like that then the stuff with the acidoxy will discolor that fairly quickly and attack it whereas the neutral curing won't so why not use neutral curing all the time you might ponder well it's just a question of how quickly they cure and how quickly you want to get away really okay so the other thing we need to know about silicones is that they're good on non-porous type materials like glass and tiles and so on they're not very good on porous materials so if you've got something like timber or you've got plaster then a silicon really isn't a very good choice for that sort of thing you really need to be looking down around the hybrid polymers and things like that the other thing that you need to remember with silicones is that they cure on contact with moisture in the air basically that's what stops and then they're not curing with evaporation now that's important really because silicones are more or less if you've got a good silicone and i say a good silicone where you're paying maybe about four quid a tube for it then it's probably a hundred percent of silicon product in it but a lot of the cheaper ones have got fillers in them so you get them from 199 a tube you think oh that's a bargain i've got a bit of that and it's fine you can use it no problem with that but what you've got there is something slightly different and the curing process is slightly different and maybe the life expectancy is also a little bit less you get what you pay for i guess now when we look at hybrid polymers we're looking at things like hb42 and ct1 to name but two of them and there's a whole load of other ones which i suspect are really probably even coming out of the same factory very similar products but one thing you will notice is that they cost around about somewhere between seven and nine quid a tube you can pay a bit more than that obviously but if you go for that as a target price now you think okay that's a lot of money i'll go and buy some of that cheap silicone but the hybrid polymers do a lot more they're uh very good at sticking to themselves in other words the cohesion they also are very good at sticking to all those other surfaces so when you start reading the the list of things that they can stick to they can stick to metal they can stick to glass stick to tile stick to wood stick to stone stick to brick and stick to you if you like so a great product costs a bit more got very very good flexibility in fact my camper van is more or less the whole thing is stuck together with that hybrid polymer and um that gets moved around driven all over the place and fingers crossed touch wood so far hasn't leaked so just shows you a product like that is really really good highly engineered product gonna cost a bit more because they're not putting cheap rubbish in it so again like i say get what you pay for so this is the general theme of this i guess and another thing to remember about hybrid polymers is that they don't shrink whereas when you look at things like decorators cork for example you could be talking about 60 solids 40 water so that's why they're cheap because basically they're selling you water and a few fillers and other things so when they dry they evaporate and they cure and that means you're losing 40 of the body of that thing straight away which can make a really big difference whereas a hybrid polymer no shrink stays where it's put and it still gives you that flexibility and it's also uv stable which is a very important thing in the silicone we have high modulus and low modulus so not only have we got to worry about whether the acetoxy or neutral curing but we've also got to worry about whether they're high modulus or low modulus now what does this mean well high modulus really means that it takes a higher degree of force to stretch it so it's a lot stronger so if you imagine something where it was really difficult to stretch you'd call that a high modulus of elasticity whereas when it's a low modulus of elasticity you can just stretch it backwards and forwards very easily but it will tend to break obviously so if you're sealing something around like around a bath or something like that where there's going to be a little bit of movement when the water goes in it might just settle down slightly when you stick a 20 stone person in there it might settle down a little bit more and you need something with a high modulus of elasticity in other words strong as old boots and in the silicon category you can also get food safe silicones so if you're doing something around the food preparation area you might like to think about that and if you're sticking together an aquarium you definitely need something that is fish safe but the sensible thing to do there would be to go and buy it from your fish supplier or whoever you buy your aquariums from aquarium aquaria i don't know those acid toxic silicons are not great on things like lead flashing because tends to eat into those again i would be looking for something like a specific purpose-made lead flashing sealant as opposed to just going and getting yourself anything that you think might do the job the problem is with all these things is that we go in there we buy something cheap and a few months later we've got to redo the job so it turns out to be a rather expensive product rather than a cheap product most of these products i've been talking about are not solvent-based but when we talk about solvent-based products that used to be the the good old standby was grip fill which kind of went off in a very very short time and that meant that if you wanted to grab adhesive if you wanted something just you would put in a panel orb sticking a batten up on the wall or something like that you would just run a bit of the grip fill down press it against the wall pull it away again for a couple of seconds and let that what we call flash off maybe 10 seconds and then when you stuck it back on you've got an instant grab of adhesive and it would stay there some of these other adhesives have got that grab ability in particular hybrid polymers are pretty good at that and as robin clavit showed a few weeks ago one of the things that you can do with a a sealant any kind of adhesive is to as you put the two surfaces together just move them up and down a little bit work them a little bit because actually you get better adhesion when you have a thin film on there rather than the thick film so surprising that but i've stuck things like shower profiles onto tiled walls because we didn't want to screw into the tiles because we didn't know what was there we just used to use a bead of silicone down the back a neutral curing one and then press it against the wall rub it a little bit and then leave it and honestly if you tried to get that off the next day you'd have to use a very very sharp blade or saw blade to actually cut the thing off the wall so they can do a tremendous job with learning to trust these things the old-fashioned guys like me probably still prefer to put a couple of screws in here and there just to hold things but really these adhesives and these silicones and things like grip fill work tremendously well the one thing to remember about polyurethane adhesives is that they are not uv resistant so you'd have to cover them up if you're using those outdoors especially things like the expanding foam and all those then you really need to protect them from the uv from the sunlight otherwise they will just degrade let's not forget mold and mildew resistant because you see on a lot of the silicone sealants and other sealants you say will not support mold growth and you think oh that's wonderful that's exactly what i want because i don't want all that dirty old black ugly mold around my shower and then of course you put it on and six months later you find you've got the black mold so he said what happened to all that mold resistance well in actual fact it's a little bit of a get out here because the product itself will not support mold growth but what does support mold growth is all the junk that you leave on there so when you have a shower a lot of the time you just have a quick rinse down maybe just use a little bit of a spray biocidal spray to get rid of anything that's lingering there and maybe even just wipe round the joints a lot of pallava to go to when you're in a rush to get to work in the morning but somebody's got to do it sometime because if you leave all that skin and all that other junk that you've washed off your body to sit on that silicone that will support mold growth because although the product is mildew resistant we're not i'm not for sure and just a little tip if i can give you one about sealing surfaces with silicone if you've got a wall coming down here and you've got a surface like the edge of a bath or a shower something like that that you want now if if there's no movement there don't worry about it but if there is movement then you need to stick to that surface and that surface but not that surface because if you stick to three surfaces it will tear in other words all that lovely high modulus won't have a chance to to to work because it won't have anywhere to stretch you've pinned it in too many places so the idea is just to exaggerate this try and get it across the back across there but put some kind of filler now if you're doing things like window frames for example you can buy this filler rod which is just a sponge rod that you poke into the joint first and that also saves you a lot of sealant if you do that and you just poke that into the joint first and then you find that when you put the silicone over the top it's not sticking to that corner it's just sticking around that very flexible bit of sponge so i hope that helps i hope you found that useful that's a quick flash through if you like in the silicone and sealant department but hopefully it'll save you money and stop you making a mistake or two i'm roger bisbee come back and see us again on skill builder sometime we've got more fun coming up remember fun oh yeah

Channel: Skill Builder

Views: 104,398

Keywords: Caulk or Sealant Adhesive, caulk sealant, HB42 Ultimate Sealant, caulk vs sealant, types of caulk, CT1 Sealant Adhesive, hb42, decorators caulk, Everbuild Stixall, Stixall Extreme Power, Gorilla Glue Grab Adhesive, silicone sealant, caulk vs silicone, home improvement, caulking guns, Sikaflex EBT, No More Nails, UniBond, caulk or silicone sealant, caulk or wood filler for trim, caulk or silicone around windows, caulk or paint trim first, Caulk or paint baseboards first

Id: 1441RGILfEk

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020