Hi, everybody.

Welcome to my world, the world of drywall.

[music playing] We're going to show you the tools of the trade to get started.

You're going to have some C clamps.

And there's times where we won't be able to hold the stud in place.

So we're going to use a C clamp to be able to hold that stud before we put a screw in it.

We have our drywall knife, aviation snips.

There's times where the chopsaw is not going to cut the stud the way it wants to, or it's the wrong height.

You always need a good hammer in this trade.

You have your drywall keyhole saw, and your drywall circle cutter.

And these are two very important tools when you're applying the drywall, cutting your sheets.

And if you come into a area where you have a circle pipe coming through the wall, you need to cut for it.

This will get a perfect circle for you.

Everything that we do is square, and level, and plum.

Big important parts of the trade is the speed square, levels, and lasers.

You want to have yourself a good impact gun.

You want to use a shaft with a magnetic tip.

Not magic, guys.

There's a magnet in there.

And so you want to be able to have a screw loaded up in there before you get your work ready to put up in the air and assembled.

This is a gas actuated fastening tool.

We don't use powder very often anymore because of the dangers of it.

So we'll use gas.

And this is what we actually use to put the track down on the ground.

You'll have a drywall router.

And this is where you're going to router out the boxes or any penetrations that's going to be on a wall.

This thing rotates clockwise.

You want to be able when you plunge it into the drywall, you want to move this counterclockwise around your penetration to avoid any runoffs in your drywall.

Now all of this is sitting on a mobile staging platform.

So this is a Baker staging known to some.

It's mobile scaffolding.

Very important.

Whenever a carpenter is on top of this, all four wheels are locked.

Now on this building, our ceiling height's only 10 feet tall.

So we're able to be able to sit on this with the locked wheels and get to our work because it's under 6 feet.

[music playing] All right, students.

What we have here is a piece of drywall.

Gypsum inside of laminated paper.

It's a calcium off of dried up lake beds and ocean floor bed.

And then we crush it down and create the gypsum board.

The reason why we use this is because of its fire resistant qualities.

All right?

We don't just make things look good and put up walls to look pretty.

What we do here is for life safety.

All right?

And every one of these walls is a reason it's either for a smoke barrier or a fire barrier or a sound barrier between two spaces.

And there's areas in a job site that you're going to need an extra protection in case the event of a fire.

The guts, the hearts of the building, they need to be protected to remain intact in case of a fire.

You're always going to see a life safety plan on your drawings.

And this is showing a two hour fire barrier you've got to maintain on a project.

And that's where you'll see the difference in the wall.

And this is fire stopping.

Spray applied after the drywall is hung.

This stuff will expand eight times its size at 300 degrees or higher, all the way up to 1,000 degrees.

And that will plug up any hole containing any smoke from a fire in this area, keeping the people on the other side of this barrier safe from that smoke or that fire.

In this case, we're building an assisted living.

So if my grandparents were in this building, I'd know that they were going to get out safe in the event of a fire.

You're going to need math.

If we do not place these walls in the right spot, not only does that throw off my trade and what we do, but the electrician behind me, the plumber behind me, and the HVAC worker behind me that's putting his work into the wall.

So it's very important to have your math down and know what you're putting down on the ground.

This is where it's important to know your fractions.

You have a 7 and 1/4 plus 44 or 9 and another 7 and 1/4 inches.

And you need to add all these numbers together from a solid point to know the right placement of this partition.

If we lay out this bathroom group wrong and we have it shifted over 6 inches the wrong way, that plumber might not be able to fit all of his pipes and all of his toilets in there in that wall because of a beam underneath.

If you move that, you miss that spot, that can cost a lot of money and a lot of time later on in the project.

Your blueprints are also going to tell you what your wall is made of.

Every job site has a life safety drawing.

And these are these thicker dotted lines you see right here with a two hour fire barrier.

It's very important to know what you're building and why you're building it.

So now that we've found our walls, we've mastered our math, we've added, subtracted, we placed our walls, now we know where it's at, we've gone ahead and shot it down.

Now this is where 16 inches on center, for instance, with one of your studs is very important.

You'll understand why a little bit later in the video.

We're setting up a laser on the wall here to make sure that we're going to line it up plum from top to bottom on where we want this wall.

And you notice how he's using his speed square at the end to eyeball where that laser is so it's exactly on the edge of that floor track.

If you look up above, sometimes a laser can be hard to see.

So we're going to go ahead and mark it with a pencil before we put our top track up.

Now that we found our top of our wall, we've marked it out, we're ready to put our top track up.

We do need to get elevated to this.

And a lot of times, we're going to use our mobile scaffolding for this.

Always have your wheels locked on the wheels of your baker to avoid any accidental movement of this platform while you're working on top of it.

So now that Nico's up in the air, he's going to rely on his partner to hand him material so we can start assembling the top of this wall.

Now this is your typical top tractor.

It has a 2 inch leg on it.

You'll notice it's different from the track that's on the ground.

And the reason this has a 2 inch leg on it is because we need to have 1 inch of deflection in this building for any snow loads could be forced on the wall later on.

Notice how he's going through the drywall and he's making a strong connection into that high hat up above.

Now that we have our bottom track down and we have our layout, our 16 inches on center for our studs, we need to transfer this up to our top track that we just put up.

In this case, we do have a stud standing up.

And we know that that is plum.

So we can go ahead and we can hook our tape measure onto the side of this stud and measure over our 16 inches, our 32, our 48.

Now when you're hooking, you need to make sure when you measure you mark that, you're going to mark the stud side because he's looking the stud.

And he's not marking center.

If we didn't have another stud already stood up that we know is plum, we can use the pointer laser and we put it on our layout that we did there.

Know that we mark the center of the stud.

So he's going to come up here and he's going to mark this laser.

And that is another way to find your layout and transfer it from the ground to the ceiling.

So now we're going to measure the length of the studs that need to be cut.

And he's going to put his tape measure to the ground.

And remember, this has a 2 inch leg on it, which means we needed a 1 inch of deflection.

So he's going to cut this stud 1 inch short of that top number of how tight it is.

This is where we cut 90% of all our steel.

Very important to have your PPE on when you're using this, not only using gloves because you're create a hot end of the stud, another sharp part of the stud, but your safety glasses.

And you want to have a secondary face shield.

You always want to have two sets of face shield when you're cutting studs to avoid not only things going in your eyes, but anything that could blow back and potentially hit you in the face.

We all love our loud music.

But we're not going to be able to listen to it very long if we don't use these when we're out here in the field chopping studs and shooting track to the ground.

Very important.

You need to use your hearing protection.

This is an added safety feature that we use just to contain sparks within that chop station so it's not spraying on other parts of the job site or other people walking by.

He's going to mark his stud.

He's going to make sure it's square to the chopsaw.

And he's going to make a cut.

After the studs are cut, this is where you're going to use your partner that's on the ground.

He's going to hand you this material so you can start erecting the wall from the top.

Notice how the ground guy's going to position the bottom of the stud on the ground so the guy up top can go ahead and put a screw in it.

He's going to put the bottom of this stud on the layout for him.

The assembler in the air is going to go ahead and put his first screw in it while the other carpenter on the ground is grabbing more material for him.

This is where a lot of teamwork comes in, guys.

This is where you get to work and talk with your buddy all day.

Without his friend on the ground here, he's going to be twice as slow and twice as dangerous getting this job done.

So it's important to have teamwork and have good communication so everybody's on the same page and working safe.

So right now, what we're doing is we're just double checking our work.

Before he walks away from this wall, he's going to make sure that he didn't make any simple mistakes.

After he's taken a look, every stud is still on layout.

He knows it's good to go and he can move on.

His partner that was giving him some help handing the material, he was also screwing off to stud at the bottom on the layout.

He's going to make sure that both sides of that stud wall is exactly 16 inches on center.

Sometimes the stud's going to walk on you.

So you might want to use a clamp, another tool that I showed you earlier.

And this will just keep that stud in place when he goes to put the screw in it.

[music playing] So what you're seeing here before he puts his sheet on the wall, he's marking the center line of each stud.

So it's going to give him a guide to go off of when he's inserting his screws into the drywall.

Tools of the trade, this is where we use our tape measure.

And we're going to measure the sheet first and see how long it needs to be and give it a half inch to lift up from the floor to make sure that it fits tight on that seam.

You're going to mark your sheet out where you have it.

And this is where we use our T square.

Put your foot on the bottom of the T square.

And then you run your knife along the edge of it.

And that gives you a square cut with your drywall.

Fold it over.

You want to snap the drywall and just score the paper on the back.

Snaps right off.

Now here, he's going to do a trick what we do in the field to make sure we don't miss studs when we're screwing is he going to mark the 16 inches from either side.

Remember, how I told you how important it was when you're laying out your studs to make sure they're 16 inches on center?

This is the importance of it for the next guy that's coming behind you.

Before we put the sheet on, if there's any electrical boxes or plumbing pipes that are going to be in the wall, we're going to mark that.

You notice where he marked it on the top and he measured down 8 inches.

So he wrote an eight right there because that's going to be 8 inches down to the center of that box.

After we've cut it to where we have room at the bottom for our [inaudible] caulking, he's going to use the drywall lifter to lift his panel up tight.

So you notice he's running the perimeter screws first because he has a box he still has to cut out.

And that's where we're going to use router tool that I showed you earlier.

So he finds the center and he'll pull it out and find the outside.

You always want to go counterclockwise when you're routing out boxes and drywall.

And after the box is cut out, you can finish screwing off your panel.

Screw pattern has to be 12 inches and 16 inches apart in the field.

When he puts his next sheet next to it, those screws have to be 7, 8 inches apart.

Notice he hasn't put any screws on the edge of this panel yet because we need to wait for the next panel before we screw both of them off.

Again, he's marked his boxes over 3 inches and 8 inches to the center.

And he's going to measure over to the center of this box is 36 inches.

And again, we use the same technique.

He's screwing off the panel away from the boxes that need to be cut out to avoid the screws from popping out prematurely.

So he remembers his marks from before, 3 inches and 8 inches to center from his eyeball marks from the height.

And that's going to tell him center of his box.

[music playing] You'll notice now this is where he's going to screw his both sides of his butt joints of his sheet in the factory edge here.

You want to wait till both sheets are on the wall before you screw that to avoid popping out your corner and making it tough for the taper to finish the wall.

You notice how he staggers his screws?

You never want to put your screws side by side.

That's going to create a weak spot in the drywall and it could crack out later.

So you always want to stagger your screws by at least an inch.

So welcome to the last part.

And this is the fun part.

This where we get to play with mud.

And this is going to be the first application for the final finished process.

And this is where we're going to put in corner beads and a first coat of paint.

We'll show you how we do that.

This is a corner beam clincher.

This is simply another tool that we use to attach the corner beam to the corner of the walls.

And it makes a nice clean line when you walk into a room.

And you'll see how this actuates right here.

And when you hit this with a mallet, it's going to clinch it onto the corner.

Every time we put on corner beam, we're going to put on mesh tape.

And this helps keep that corner strong anybody bringing their furniture into this unit when they move in and they accidentally bump into it with their couch, they're not going to break the corner off.

And this is what makes this corner strong.

[music playing] We open up a new bucket of mud, it comes just like this.

You want to thin it down a little bit with some water so it's going to be easier to apply on the wall with your first coat.

And this is the mixing paddle you're going to put into your mixing drill.

Now these have to have a lot of talk because there's a lot of weight that you're trying to mix up with this mud.

And it does not come premixed.

You need to thin it out and mix it up so you don't come with any clumps.

Same consistency as mom's pancakes.

So here in the first coat application, we're going to be applying mud.

And you always want to play the tape in a wet bed of mud.

And you see what she's going to do she's going to take this 6 inch knife and hold it at an angle and cover the joint with the joint compound.

And this here, when we apply the first coat of paper tape, and this goes on every seam and every joint in the drywall.

And this is where I was talking about not only good finishes, but this needs to be in here for UL rating for a fire rated wall or a smoke rated assembly.

She's not polling so tight to where it's pulling the mud out from behind the table.

It's still keeping a wet bed of mud behind that tape.

Sometimes, the screws don't always make their way home.

Turn your knife around.

And you can pound in the screw.

So here's where we're going to play the tape to an inside corner.

She's going to use the same technique on both sides of the corner with applying the joint compound rather heavy on there because again, you want to make sure that the tape is embedded into the joint compound.

And if you see on the tape real close, it splits in the middle.

It has a natural fold in it.

She has it embedded in the tape.

And now this is where we wipe off the excess.

Notice how she uses her mud pan as her second set of hands.

When you pull that first run to tighten your tape, you need to hold it down so it doesn't drag along the wall and create a wrinkle.

Very important to make sure you have enough compopund behind it so you don't create bubbles in the seams.

[music playing] So now that we've seen the application of the corner bead in the mesh to keep it strong, we're going to use the same technique that we did with our first coat as our paper tape, and we're going to coat this corner bead with joint compound.

This here is going to be an 8 inch knife because we want to cover the corner more than 6 inches away from it.

And this 8 inch knife is going to be able to spread this mud out a little bit smoother.

Notice how he's laying the joint compound on thick.

Don't be afraid to use material here, guys.

This is where we're building our coat.

And we're getting our smooth finishes that we need from the rough carpentry.

And so he uses a corner as a guide to lightly smooth this out.

And then you'll see how he's going to feather his corner in with his smaller knife.

Once we've completed the process on one side of the corner, we just simply move to the next side of the corner and do the same thing.

And you can coat both sides of an outside corner when doing second coat of taping.

But you can only coat one side of an inside corner.

Again, using the corner bead as a guide and cleaning your corner when you're done.

And that's a first coat of an outside corner.

Major funding for I Build New Hampshire is provided by-- with additional funding from-- [music playing]