Hi, I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. This is part two of the three videos. I’m showing you different techniques on how to cut drywall.
Cutting Drywall Part 2
There are going to be times that you have to do what they call a rip on the board which is basically, you have a four-foot width on a typical piece of dry wall and let’s say you have ceiling board or a wall board that you only want three-foot wide. So, you have to cut something off the length.
The basic techniques that you did for cutting the board, lengthways, can also be done long ways. Either you can say, say you want 12 inches you can hold your tape at 12 inches, put it up on the top of the seam, hold your knife against the bottom and go ahead and cut or you can measure your 12 inches, put your pencil mark or a notch in the edge of the board like we did the last time. Come over here, measure your 12 inches again and then go ahead and slip your chalk line in to the groove, bring it over to the other 12-inch mark, and snap your line, follow that line with a knife.
Once that knife cut is done, there’s a couple of different ways you can get this piece of board off to this drywall. Once you have your knife cut, your knife already made a score down the front edge of the front of the board and you break the board just like you did with the upright. You can do it the same way. There are three different ways you can do it.
The first way is, you take a knife in the front from all the way across, go ahead and snap it off that way. The second way is, you can reach around behind, cut into the groove, go ahead and snap the board off and you could do it that way. But the third way, especially on a length cut is you can simply bend the board over like this pushing on one corner. You can push it down and then it’ll come right off that way, too.
Yes, it will do a little tear on the back of the paper but not enough to do any damage to the integrity of the board. Here’s a round box. You pretty much cut all around boxes the same whether it’s this size box or it’s a can-like round. There are two different ways you can measure it.
The first way is to measure from your framing and come over and measure to the center which this year would be about 33 then measure from your top and measure down to the center again which that would be 38. So, where the 33 and the 38 cross, that’s going to give you your center of your box. This box here in particular happens to be a slightly heavy 3-1/2 inches and that’s what we’re going to want to cut our circle.
Every round box that you have in your house can be measured that way. A second way to measure that is to measure over from wherever you’re coming from. Measure these sides of the box which is at 24. Measure these sides of the box which is at 27 and 9/16. Go ahead and transfer those marks on your drywall then measure down from the top of your framing, from where the board’s are going to go tight and the top of your box is measuring here at 27 and above here your box is measuring 30 and 9/16.
Once you get that, you’re basically going to have four square marks then you need to make a circle mark in the center of it. There are a couple different ways you can do that. The two different ways I showed you to mark them. This is the center mark and this is the four side mark.
Now we already measure the box, we know we want 3 and 9/16. There are two ways you can do it. You can take a simple compass to kind of measure it up so that it’s pretty close so that it hits all the lines. Once you get that center mark you can go ahead and take your compass and very gently make a pencil line around. So that it should come real close to hit in all four of the marks or you can take the compass and you can set it to the center mark and just go ahead and do the same thing. Just go ahead and mark it all way around or this may be worth buying for you. This is called a circle cutter. It has a little gauge on it that has a mark here at three and 9/16.
What’s nice about this is you can stick it in. Now to do this, you can also do it either way. Set it up between the four squares or go ahead and just go to the center mark. What’s nice about this is it has a little cutting wheel here. You can go ahead and stick it in the center mark, roll it around and it will make a cut in the surface paper of the drywall.
Now, either method that you use, you can go ahead and take a keyhole saw and you can keyhole saw around by hand on the line. You can even do it with this but with the circle cutter, there’s a little easier method that you can use. Simply take your hammer, since you already cut as deep as that wheel can cut, blow the center of it out, rip off all the lose edges, maybe take a razor knife and kind of rub it around where you got some of this little bump sticking up and this board is ready to hang.
Now, some people are saying when you blow that out like that with a hammer, it does a whole bunch of damage to the back of the board. That’s true but as long as you do it gently enough and you cut as deep with the circle cutter as you can. There are plenty enough integrity here to keep that drywall intact and give you a nice fit around that round box.
Let me show you a third technique for how to cut out a round hole.
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