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Took me 8 months to notice the taping knife flex issue
I was getting weird hollow spots on my butt joints for months and kept blaming the mud, until a veteran taper watched me work and pointed out my 6 inch knife was flexing too much under pressure. He handed me a stiffer knife and the next joint laid down perfectly flat. Have any of you dealt with a tool that seemed fine but was actually the reason your finish was off?
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drew_thomas918d ago
A 6 inch knife flexing is normal though, that's just how those blades are made. I ran into this same thing about 12 years ago and a guy told me the same stuff, so I went and bought a stiffer knife and honestly it didn't fix anything. The real problem was my pressure, not the blade. I was pushing way too hard on the first coat trying to bury the tape in one pass, and that's what was causing the hollow spots, not the flex. A stiffer knife just hid it for a while because I couldn't bow the blade as easy, but I was still loading up too much mud in the middle. Once I backed off and started running two thinner coats with lighter pressure, my joints came out flat with the same flexy knife I'd been blaming for months. Not saying your guy was wrong about what he saw, but the tool gets blamed a lot when it's really the hand holding it.
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