Hear Trim-Tex Exec Mike Garcia Talk All Things Corner Bead

The drywall industry is packed with trade secrets, in-jokes and its own unique little quirks, which can make it kind of daunting to newcomers. For the lowdown on the drywall world, sometimes you just need to hear about it straight from the source. That’s what makes long-form podcasts such a great resource — just put on your headphones and learn a thing or two while you work. One great podcast like this is called Plastering Down Under from Australian drywall supply heavyweight Wallboard Tools, which recently hosted Trim-Tex Chief Revenue Officer Mike Garcia to talk all things corner bead!

In this episode of the podcast, which is hosted by Wallboard’s Technical Specialist Leigh Ryan, Mike opens up about everything from the history of Trim-Tex to the benefits of vinyl materials to his own personal favorite corner bead profiles. We’ve excerpted some of the choice quotes from the conversation in the video and text below, but the whole thing is definitely worth a listen — you can find Plastering Down Under on all the popular podcasts apps, or you can listen to the episode directly here.

Mike on metal versus vinyl corner bead

If you’ve been following us for a while, you probably already know that talking about the benefits of using vinyl corner beads over old-fashioned metal ones is one of our favorite subjects. And it’s one of Mike’s, too!

When asked by Leigh about why vinyl is considered the far more durable material for corner bead, Mike had this to say:

“Most people only look at if the bead was damaged or not, but they don't look further to say, ‘Okay, both got damaged, but which one's easier and faster to repair?’ And that's the second piece to it. If you're just thinking about metal versus plastic, which is stronger? You know, you're naturally going to think metal… But what I've noticed is, with a metal corner bead, once they fail and collapse, it stays that way. It’s done, it's not coming back. So, to try and repair that and pull out the corner, it's never going to be the same. You almost want to cut that piece out and put something else in.

With a vinyl corner bead, with any plastic, it wants to absorb that impact and return back to its original shape. So, in most cases, you might get a crack in it, you might get some mud flaking off the edges. But for the most part, it's going to come back to its shape.

That, in most cases, is easy to repair without cutting out that section. Throw a few staples in, throw some more mud on it, you're done … In our comparisons, when we dropped the weight onto a fully finished corner, we're able to outperform metal corner beads, and outperform in the repairability."

Mike’s favorite corner bead profiles

One of the other sections we loved from Mike’s conversation with Leigh is when they start to talk about Mike’s favorite corner bead profiles. Of course, with a dense catalog with a wide variety of drywall accessories, we've got a ton of options to choose from. Out of everything, Mike settled on two beads in particular: Fast Edge® Paper and the Closed Angle version of our Rigid Low Profile Corner Bead. Mike says:

“That's like trying to pick your favorite child. I would say for a normal 90-degree corner bead, there's two of them. There's the Rigid Closed Angle. The reasoning for that one is we developed that to kind of mimic a metal corner bead, and it has a little bit more of a closed angle. It allows for adjustment for poor framing, which you know, framing is not perfect, right?...

Then a newer product is our Fast Edge Paper, and the reason I love that product is, we've always been a vinyl extrusion company. We never wanted to make something that had paper on it. That was our competition.

When we started to really listen to our end users, you know, you find that they just want the paper on it, that works for them. They're not having problems. And we started to realize that, if we just created a product and laminated it, people would buy that from us because they know that we make a great product.

So that took us a while. We were developing that for almost two years because we'd never done something like that before. And when we finally brought that to market, it's been incredible, the acceptance of it.

Subscribe to Plastering Down Under on your favorite podcast-listening app — they’ve featured all kinds of drywall pros, and it’s an especially interesting pod if you want to understand the difference between the North American and Australian drywall finishing trades. Thanks to Leigh for hosting Mike on your show!

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