The Holy Grail of Caulking Tips

Caulking doesn't have to be a soul crusher. Now there is one holy grail of caulking tips that will take you right to the pinnacle of the caulking world. But that tip sits on top of four key fundamentals. Fundamental number one, get yourself a quality dripless caulking gun. This one came from Amazon. I'll put a link in the description. The yellow dripless caulking guns are the way to go. This is what most professional painters will use. Now they're all about the same. They're always yellow. They'll always say dripless. They do not have that little lever at the back that you have to press. When you let go of the trigger, the caulking stops immediately, which is nice. When you have the little push button guns, they're fine too. But the thing is, is sooner or later, you're going to forget to push the button and it's just going to everywhere and make a giant mess. Fundamental number two is a small tip. Now it's literally a small tip on your caulking tube. So when you have a new tube of DAP or caulking, you're going to want to cut the smallest hole possible on here. You're barely going to want to cut any of the end off. And I actually like to put the knife blade out. So you get to a part of the knife blade that hasn't really seen a lot of action. So you just want to cut a tiny sliver off of the end. You see how tiny that is? I've cut off so little that there isn't even a hole. So what you're going to need to do is grab a thumbtack. Thumbtacks work perfect for this little operation. Now, if you can't find a thumbtack, have a look in your junk drawer at home. You don't even really have to look in there. Just rummage your hand around. You'll find it. So yeah, take the thumbtack and then just poke it in the end. And then you have yourself a tiny little perfect dapping hole. And fundamental number three. Put an orientation line on your DAP tube. So what you want to do is find the long point of the little micro tip that you've put on there and then draw yourself a black line down the tube like this. Like so. Yeah, so the orientation line is going to make your life so much easier. With this small tip, it's hard to see which way it's actually angled. So yeah, you put the orientation line on there. You can spin this around in the gun depending on which way you're going. Say you're coming this way. You're turning a corner. You might need to spin it a little bit. The orientation line actually could be the holy grail of secrets, but it's not. There's a better one. Stick around. We got one more fundamental and then we'll hit the holy grail. And fundamental number four. Always have a wet rag. Caulking is messy. Keep your fingers clean. Keep the gun tip clean. If you put too much on in one spot, wipe it out. Always have a wet rag with you because caulking is a messy job. This makes it 10 times easier. You've hit your four fundamentals. You have the right gun. You've cut the micro tip. You have your orientation line on the tube and you have your wet rag handy. You're ready to go from good to a bad mother. This is the payoff pitch. If you've ever done a lot of caulking, you may notice that after you use a tube of caulk, say it's about halfway down, it starts to get better and better. This is why. What you want to do at the very start, you have your micro tip on here, your orientation line. You want to create a little v-groove on this tip so that it will ride perfectly and get the tip a little closer. That way squeezing the caulk in, squeezing the caulking, the caulking material into the crack rather than creating a big mess on the top. So in order to create that, I've seen painters take an exacto knife and cut a little v-groove onto there. But the easiest way to do it is what I'll show you right now. I'll put a link at the end of the video on how to make these. They're awesome. But take two sanding blocks, clamp them together, and then take your tube. Get the orientation line as you would be holding it for dapping, like a baseboard or a casing. Take your tube of dap and then actually probably just take it right out of the gun. A little easier to handle. And then just take that in the corner and just get that, wear that v-groove in there right from the start. And then you don't have to wait until you get down half a tube. Yeah, so I've got a nice groove on there right now. I did about three passes here. And what that will do is when you're caulking, it's going to fit right into that corner. It gets a little bit fuzzy with the sandpaper, so you can pick that off with your fingernail. It doesn't really matter if it's a little bit fuzzy. That's okay. Check this out. So this is a little sample board. This is the micro tip with the bevel sanded into it. We'll do a test of that. Yeah, so that's one pass with the gun. One finger swipe. So this is what it's like with just the micro bevel here with no grooves on the side. You'll see what that does. So that's one swipe there. One swipe with the finger. And then if you cut like a regular size tip on here that most people would cut, so that you don't have one where you don't even use a thumbtack, that would be kind of like, well, it's not going to carry away. Like that would probably be what most people would use. And that would look like this. It doesn't look too bad without tooling it, but there is ridges there. So you would want to get your finger on there and then that's what you're looking like there. The micro grip v-groove is unbelievable. You can see, like, it just puts on so little material. It's so neat and tidy. And if you get the right flow pressure going, you don't even have to swipe your finger on there. It'll just be laying it down almost perfectly. Yeah, it's so much neater than the bigger tip. Like, kind of like the eighth inch standard tip is kind of gross, actually, when you see the two different colors. And then even just a micro tip, it's still leaving a lot of material. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you on the next video.