The Devil is in the Detail

I met a client recently who was very “old school” in his trade. I mean old not in any derogatory sense. He was a tradesman who knew his trade well and clearly had been doing it for a long time. He learned that trade as an apprentice carpenter – an apprentice that was treated to a tough learning regime. His views on the skills of modern dry lining were only partly complimentary. What he stated to me is that there just were not enough truly skilled craftsmen who could produce quality work particularly when it came to plaster detailing. This he blamed in part on the loss of good motivated apprentices over many years and the soft touch adopted for modern training schemes.

Dry lining is not rocket science. Many dry liners have learned their skills on the job and are more than capable, as a consequence, of the basic skills. However, whilst “throwing” up large areas of plasterboard ceilings or plasterboard walls at “piece” rates encourages productivity it does not always encourage quality nor does it demonstrate the skills of the craft.  Those trade skills do exist but potentially in the hands of fewer men and good employers will keep skilled fixers and quite rightly so.

The detail we discussed, perhaps like two grumpy old men (I’m not that old though), was a light cove. His point of view was how impossibly difficult and time consuming it is to create on site a plasterboard cove with a perfectly cut and straight upstand let alone to build the supports and tape and joint it even if the skilled craftsmen were around. Which brought us to V-Cut’s solution.

An edge of a plasterboard that is cut on a CNC machine will be perfectly straight and parallel to a v-cut that enables it to fold always at a perfect right angle equal distance to each other. There is no corner beading and the only taping and jointing is where one board buts to another. A man on site no matter how good could not possibly create the machined solution and to produce anything near would take considerably longer. The V-Cut light cove will be quicker, cheaper and better. As always the devil is in the detail.