WHICH IS BETTER??? Wet or dry sanding of Drywall

everybody it's a guy with that kept a guy videos and welcome to my channel we're gonna talk to you today about the difference between dry sending drywall and wet sanding and we're gonna do that right after this [Music] everybody and thanks a lot for coming by my channel as always I appreciate my followers and subscribers if you've got a minute be sure and check out that subscribe button it's down in my description and it'll be at the end of the video and if you click that Bell icon you'll get notified of future up coming videos now over my 30 plus years of doing drywall I've heard discussion many times about sanding with a wet sponge versus dry sanding so we're going to talk a little bit about that because there's actually a place for both but you'll find that most professional drywallers they do about 99.9 percent dry sanding and there is a reason for that so I'm gonna show you when it's okay to use a wet sanding method and why it doesn't doesn't work so great okay so what I've done is set up a little mock setup here and I've tried to recreate two different sites here that are almost the same so in other words we've got this side that's basically the same as this so that way I can do wet wet sanding on one and dry on the other you'll better tell real easy which one we're doing because when it gets wet it's going to look totally different so what I created here is we have a patch of mud here that basically has a little bit thicker edge on one side and a thinner edge on the other so it's about the same over here and then here we have pretty much a heavy blob of mud that I squared off so it's got mostly square edges on it so that would be kind of representative of some fairly heavy sloppy work and then here what I'm going to show you is sanding these middle marks which are lap marks and you can see these in the video and I'll take it close-up of all these and show you that here off to the side of the screen and each one is a little bit different these were gonna be sandy in the middle here we're gonna be sending a heavy edge and trying to get a feather out of it and a tapered edge and here we're going to have a thin edge that we just need to taper out a little bit more feather it out and here we got a thicker edge and we're gonna try it with dry and then wet now first let me explain a little bit about sanding drywall when you're sending drywall there's kind of two purposes to sanding drywall to primary that we're gonna cover here and that is getting rid of edges so that's why we created these edges and in tapering your joints when you're coding joints you want everything to be tapered I've got a little illustration right here on the side and I'm going to I'm gonna put that illustration up here and I'm going to talk to you about it off-camera and explain why we got to pay attention to these things okay what this illustration shows is how we want to actually accomplish the feathering as you can see where I indicated good feathering you can see that we're tapering the mud off at a very gradual gentle slope whereas on the right you can actually get rid of the bad edge but if it's a sharp abrupt softening it's not actually tapered or feathered and therefore it's going to still show when everything's done okay so now getting back to actually doing this what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with dry sanding so let's say we're sending this and we want this to blend in so we can do repair whatever we're doing new construction we want these edges to go away because that even that little edge right there as again you can see in this picture here that will edge would Telegraph right through most any texture except for maybe a skip trowel texture this edge definitely and so we've got to taper it out like in that illustration I just showed you and the way you do that is you really need a hard flat surface and yeah these are sponges so they got a little bit of give to them but they're still pretty solid they don't flex like an actual sponge does you've got a sponge in the bucket which I'll show you once I get it out but we don't want to get it out just yet the other common way of sanding is where the drywall seven-pole and this has an even more rigid surface it actually does have a little bit of foam rubber under here but this is an aluminum base so it has no gift to it and whenever you're trying to get a taper like in that illustration I showed you you want you really need something fairly firm because the problem is if you're sending this one and you're trying to taper that out a sponge tends to conform to the edge too much and it'll just soften the edge and it may look like it's okay but you've got that hard edge like I showed you an illustration not the soft tapered edge with a sanding sponge or send pull anything more rigid you'll get a nice soft one so if we were gonna send this edge here there's a couple things to keep in mind a sand pole might have a little bit harder time with it that I just showed you but if we take this we can tilt it a little bit and that's an exaggerated tilt right there but we can tilt it a little bit and concentrate our sanding on this edge because if you don't I'll exaggerate this but if I fan too much like that I end up saying a line right there so you got to put slightly more pressure on the outside so we're just going that a little bit and about that quickly we have tapered that edge out and I'll show you all these at the end too so you'll see this edge is just pretty much as feathered out as you can get now we're gonna send this other edge which is a little more intense so it's gonna take we don't normally want to leave an edge that bad and as a professional I wouldn't leave an edge that bad but if it happens take the sanding sponge and concentrate it mostly on here stay off the paper you sand too much on the paper you can see it starting to muck up the paper it'll raise the NAP on it and it will actually damage it so we defended with that outside pressure and now we want to send it a little further up in here so we don't get that sudden hard edge like a surge in the illustration so we send it just a little bit longer with a little bit more pressure on the middle and when we get up out there that that one's ready to go so now let's try it with the wet sponge and when you're doing the wet site you just want to have it medium wet you don't want this thing running water all over the floor okay so now for the wet sandy we're going to start with the same we're gonna start on this edge and wet sanding works the best on these fine edges so it should work fine but let me show you the first drawback to this if you wet it like that often just by getting it wet it gives the appearance that making it look like that edge run away like that but once it dries it will actually come back and it's kind of hard to believe sometime but it does because just wetting it it just creates an optical illusion so go ahead and do the same technique more pressure on the outside and you can see it went through that pretty easy it's a nicely feathered out it works great on those fine edges now let's go over to the coarser edge and we're gonna sand on that and with a bit of work we can get that decent but it's it's I can tell you that it's harder to not have that sudden drop-off even though we got a feathered edge here and that's nice and soft we aren't able to taper it as easily not saying you can't at all it's just harder to do so that's our first illustration on the simple one let's put that back in the water and we will go to the dry on the heavy really heavy edges and make those go away because they are heavy here this is thicker we've got to sand more than just the edges we just sand that edge like that sure it looks like we feathered the edge but again it's got that harsh drop off and it's still gonna show through your texture so we've got to taper that further up in there so it takes a little more offending to get it and on this one we want to go to about here and we get this really soft edge that means you've got it feathered perfectly so we'll just do two sides on this one and you can see with a sanding sponge it goes through pretty quick that's one advantage now of course the disadvantage is the dust I hate the dust as much as anybody but sometimes if it works better it works better let's go to the wet on the opposite side okay one thing you can see is see I don't have as much control I can't control that edge is straight and get a straighter edge that's because of the softness it's because of the way it's tape or a conforming to the shape of the mud it won't flatten it out as much because if you have a hump and you put that hump into this sponge it just kind of conforms to it as it goes along so it won't flatten things out as well and it'll look pretty decent but I can tell you on these heavier edges I won't ever use a sponge I've played with it in the past because I hate dust and see there's another problem I lost that control because it's soft it probably felt my finger coming through the sponge created a line it's just too soft for those kind of edges so let's call that an even draw up here on these spine edges although this one's questionable here this one is a win this one is a loser let's move on to the internal edges and try sending that so of course we'll start with the dry sanding and we're just praying to get these lap marks in the middle here and these I can tell you are really easy to sand if you're going to leave edges in your drywall mud you want to leave a high edge in the middle instead of a void so let's send those real quick and pretty much that quick that one's perfectly smooth it sounds out really easy so straight on this side we should still have plenty of moisture we got the clean sponge side I can still see the faint outline of those ridges now they're just about gone trying to be just as gentle on this sponge as I can so they're I think we may have accomplished it but again you see I deviated out here it didn't have as much control I got this big ol sponge you just have a little better control over these flatter Sanders like this or even the sand pull now I'm going to demonstrate the sentinel real briefly here yep this doesn't move too much it's just sitting here so see it's writing primarily on the middle it doesn't leave edges it doesn't deviate out here and take out these outside edges so you have better control with these flat sanding surfaces so when this dries time or dry it up take some pictures of it when it's done and we're going to show that here at the end so right now I'm gonna call this an undecided and as soon as I pop them pictures up for you I'll mark it with a checkmark or an X if I feel like it worked or it didn't but mostly because of that right there I'd say it primarily didn't work but of course huge advantage huge win over here no dust notice that so when I'm standing a job in a house and I've got a repair and I get down to that final a little bit where I just need that little bit of an edge to go away I will sometimes break out that sanding sponge and go ahead and do it now if I'm standing on the ceiling it's the disadvantages I always have water running down my arm down my shirt and it's kind of messy but if you want to minimize the dust that's the secret now before you go I got a question for you I got to think of it first have you ever tried either of these methods and if you if you try it after the video or whatever let me know in the comments let me know how it went for you and how it worked because I know every little is different and you guys do things different than we do as pros and I'm interested to hear how it goes so let me know and I thank you for stopping by check out my links at the end and we will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 138,545

Rating: 4.6970243 out of 5

Keywords: how to fix drywall, how to repair drywall, how to finish drywall, finishing drywall, taping drywall, repairing a hole in the wall, repairing a crack in the wall, that kilted guy, wet sanding drywall, sanding drywall, wet vs dry sanding, sponge sanding drywall

Id: 9Ztudl3LIhc

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017