Reduce Drywall Sanding Dust 90%!  With NO Vacuum.

Hey, when it comes to sanding drywall, there's a lot of confusion out there. I'm going to try and tell you when the pros sand and when you don't want to. I'm going to talk about that right after this. All right, I'm just going to go over when do the pros sand drywall. And yes, we sand drywall too. At least I do. I don't think there's any way around it. You need to sand some, but novices in that you have the wrong view of sanding. And often you think put the mud on real heavy and sand it flat. Put it over the whole hole. I'm going to let that dry and sand it. That's actually a bad idea. You often end up damaging the drywall, maybe the joint tape. You don't really get it looking good. You see over here, I'm hitting the paper, but the paper changes color. So as pros, what we shoot for is coating it smooth and only sanding off the minor defects. And I'm going to go over some pictures of the kind of things we might sand here in just a minute. Now you can see I got several different sanders here. Now, if you want to know all about different sanders, how to use them and all that, I'm going to do a separate video on that another time. But we have the Radius 360 Circular, the Triangle, the Hand Sander, the Rectangular, and the Black Widow. Hi puppy dog. Go up there. And I've got all these because there's a different use for all of them. Now, you don't really have to have all of them. And that's what I'll talk about in that sanding detailed special. But basically what we're doing is we're going around and sanding between coats just to knock off some of these little burrs and little gremlins hanging around. And so I'm going to show you some pictures and talk about that here in just a second. But all we're doing is a really quick sanding like you see in this video I'm going to show you. And we're just going over it often. I just go over it one time with a decent amount of pressure. You're not raising hardly any dust. You're not trying to sand much at all. You're catching those little high points and knocking them off so they don't get into your mud when you go to actually coat. Especially if you're running tools. Your tools will pick up the little burrs and that and get into your mud and cause scratches and you'll fight it. Okay, now I'm going to show you a little video of me sanding. I'm using the Black Widow sander. And you can see how quickly I'm just brushing over everything. And I'm going to show you here when I come across a defect or two that I want to point out to you. You can see how you just flip that head as you go. And right here coming up is a defect which is what we're looking for. Little bumps like that. You want to just knock it off real quick. And you see it only took two little passes. And you can see here how I am constantly twisting the head to get it to go in the angle that I want. You just twist it as you go. And when you lift it, you can give it a little flip and it goes right over to the other wall you want to sand. You get pretty good at it after a while. Which is why we often call it the idiot stick. Any idiot can run it. But only a skilled, well-taught person knows how to use it right. Because again, you can over sand or even under sand. So now we're moving along here. Getting past this part right here. And then I'm going to show you another part that's kind of important. And that's this section here. You can see where I dripped on the wall several places on the left. Now you can sand off the minor ones like that. But see that big one? Don't even try it. If you try and sand that big one off, you're just going to damage the paper and spend a lot of time. So your best bet is to scrape it off. Now if this was all-purpose regular weight, it may do some damage to the paper because it sticks so well. So be prepared for that. And you also want to sand off things like this and this. But not low spots like this one or this one. Those should just be filled in by putting a little coat of mud on them. So basically anything that's poking out. But let me also show you lap marks. This is an exaggerated form of lap marks. But that's basically where your knife mark or your knife picks up and it leaves these marks. I call them lap marks. You want to sand them down too. Another area where you guys make a lot of dust is sanding butt joints and even recess joints if you do it wrong. You can see here how a butt joint has a hump in it. Almost always because it has a piece of tape on a flat surface with mud on top. A lot of you try to put the mud on too thick and then sand it down. Now as a novice, I expect that you will put it on a little bit too thick. But just try not to get it on so thick that you stand there and just sand and sand and end up looking like this guy. So put it on just thick enough to cover up the joint tape and try and leave it at that. Now when you're all done coating everything, that's when you can pay attention to the outside edges. You do want to feather out that outside edge a little bit depending on the type of finish you're doing. This illustration shows you how to do it right. So you can run your sanding pad across that outside edge a little bit. But just don't get carried away again. Hey if you want to increase your learning power a thousand percent, be sure to subscribe to my channel and hit that thumbs up. After you subscribe, look for that bell. Click the bell and you'll get notified of all the videos. Hey you see these other things popping up here? These are clickable links. If any of those interest you, click on one. I'm sure it'll help you out. I look forward to seeing you on the next video. Take care everybody.