fat on walls

[daz1968]

i am a bit puzzled. i was told and have practisedit, when first wet trowelling scrape fat off wall or ceiling and discard, but i was working with a plasterer the otherd ay who has been plastering for many years, wet trowelling and instead of scrapping off fat with angled trowel actually keeping his trowel pretty flat to wall and just spreading the fat around the wall, then one dry trowel to polish up the fat . i dont know how wall turned out as i was only with him for the one day . whats the right way and the wrong way god its a nightmare learning and watch ing someone else completly throw out the window what you have been shown ??? ??? ??? :-\

 

[goody]

orite man, you shouldn't have any fat on your walls really. Do you use two coats? or maybe are biting off too much given the limits of your methods to keep a consistent quality? I mean everybody has an amount of coverage that they can keep under control to always give good results. When my walls are setting they are a consistent dark colour with no light bits at all. When wet trowelling I only gently lube the trowel as i go a little with a quick swipe of the brush not ever the wall. Sometimes starting to cross trowell at this point if the angle of light from windows etc is shining right across it. If there is any fat you should try and integrate it back into the wall by lowering the angle of the trowel not scraping it across to gather up the fat and discarding it.

 

[daz1968]

orite man, you shouldn't have any fat on your walls really. Do you use two coats? or maybe are biting off too much given the limits of your methods to keep a consistent quality? I mean everybody has an amount of coverage that they can keep under control to always give good results. When my walls are setting they are a consistent dark colour with no light bits at all. When wet trowelling I only gently lube the trowel as i go a little with a quick swipe of the brush not ever the wall. Sometimes starting to cross trowell at this point if the angle of light from windows etc is shining right across it. If there is any fat you should try and integrate it back into the wall by lowering the angle of the trowel not scraping it across to gather up the fat and discarding it.

so what you are saying is use fat on wet trowel

 

[goody]

The idea is to end up with nothing coming off the wall once laid on and keeping the angle of the trowel low so that every trowel is only ever flattening and not removing. If this is consistent throughout the different stages of your set then you should end up with nice consistently even walls with no hollows or gritty bits due to the upper surface being stripped back.

 

[topmark]

If you get everything right you should be taking very little fat from the plaster when trowelling up. Eg set size, thickness, timing between trowelling, amount of water used when trowelling. On a set where you may be "losing it" then wetting it down and using the fat to fill out the misses, is a get out the sh1t method and not good practice.