Skill Builder Guides & reviews for building and construction
The latest target in their sights is the making good and small repair market. This is not just plasterers, who will probably always have a half bag on the van anyway, but plumbers, electricians and jobbing builders who make good and repair as they go rather than calling in a spread. Now you might think that British Gypsum would have this market sewn up but you may have noticed there are a lot of companies making small bags of patching or repair fillers and doing well out of it. Some days it is hard to make up your mind whether to buy a big bag of regular plaster or go for something smaller and more versatile. The trouble is that you often find that a 10 kilo bag of Easy Sand filler for example costs more than a 25 Kilo bag of multi finish.
But I suppose when you need it you need it. If, for example, you are an electrician and you need to fill in a chase and you don’t want to come back the next day to apply the finish you need a base coat that goes off super fast or you need a one – coat plaster that you can dub out and build up to a good finish. There are a lot of products out there which do this job well and you can build them up but they usually take a few hours to go off which means you could be hanging around waiting for the base coat to go off before you can get the final coat on.
My solution in the past has been to mix a bit of cement with a bit of bonding and use that to fill with but when you apply the finish you find you will often get bubble trouble as the base coat continues to cook and push moisture out through the face.
British Gypsum’s scientists have now come up with a special Thistle Bonding 60 that will dry in one hour and, more importantly accept any type of finish you care to use. You can apply a Thistle finish or, if you aren’t that good at plastering, you can apply Easy Sand or jointing compound which is basically the same thing in a different bag. To be honest I couldn’t tell you exactly how long a normal bag of bonding would take to set. I thought it was fairly quick but I must admit I have never put a stopwatch on it.
I can find plenty of jobs to do with a product such as this so I opted for a big bag but if you are a spark or plumber you might prefer to have a plastic tub on the van rather than a dusty bag that could spill out all over you nice clean tools.
I hadn’t got any chases to do but I found a badly damaged corner behind a front door that needed a quick repair. I mixed it up a bit on the sloppy side to see if it would hang around longer, not that I wanted it to but this was research. It turned out to be a warmish day and after my obligatory tea break and sit in the sun I went back and found it was good to go.
I used some multi-finish for the top coat and, just as they promised there was no bubble trouble. So it was a quick in and out job, if you’ll pardon the expression.
