How To Hand Coat Drywall Joints And Beads With The Flat Knife

Most home owners today would use a flat knife when it comes to hand coating, We are going to show you how to use the flat knife to hand coat: recessed joints(flat joints) and butt joints, first and second coat,  and also the beads, first and second coat.

Coating The Recessed Joints And Butt Joints (First And Second Coat)

To hand coat the flats and butts we mix up finishing mud, straight from the box, without any water added, specially for the first coat so that it doesn't shrink back to much. First you want to work the flat joints, get all your flat joints coated before moving onto doing the butt joints. When your hand coating a flat, you don't need to need to make your coat super thick, remember that the tape is embedded into the drywall, your coat doesn't need to be really wide or nothing. Try to make your edges straight and even, makes for a better looking job, but not necessary. Use the flat knife to apply mud onto the flat first, apply an even tight coat across the entire length of the flat, unless it's really long then break it up. Once you got mud on, feather the sides down, do one side then the other side, and then do a light final pass down in the middle of the flat. You don't want to push all the mud into the middle of the flat making you coat "hump" in the middle. You need to flatten it out. This is the first coat, you don't need a perfect coat, leave it rough, sand it down, and move on. Once you flat joints have been coated, hand coat all the butt joints the same way, except making you coat a little wider and thicker to compensate for "no bevels". Again remember that this coat will be sanded down and recoated maybe up to 2 more times, so perfection is not needed at this stage.

Before the second coat you must: ROUGH SAND

For the second coat,everything is the same as the first coat, except this time we added soap the mud, and you need to make this coat a little wider or bigger then the last coat, covering overtop the edges of the last coat. Also you should be a little bit more picky, should be easier to have a nicer finish as you apply more coats. One thing that you should watch for right now is pin-hole(fish eyes) that are in the mud, like air bubbles, if you see those you can always leave them to dry and add more mud later, or you can try to get rid of them right now with a repass.

 When this dries its ready for a: FINISH SAND