What Do You Want to Know About Buttboard Drywall Backer?

It may just be one item in Trim-Tex’s large catalog, but Buttboard is a frequent source of questions and debate in the drywall community. Between our customer service team and the comments sections of our social media channels, we receive Buttboard questions all the time: What is it? Can affixing a butt joint into a piece of OSB plywood really be as secure as affixing into a stud? Why do some folks in the drywall community make such a big deal about it? We want to answer those questions and many more — so what do you want to know about Buttboard Drywall Backer?

For answers to some of those most common Buttboard questions, check out the video below, where the CEO of Trim-Tex — the one-and-only Joe Koenig, Jr. — takes you behind the scenes to see how Buttboard is made and how it’s used. And if you have any questions he doesn’t answer here, we want to hear them; we may answer them in a future episode of our new educational video series, “Drywall Minute”!

All About Buttboard | Trim-Tex Drywall Minute w/ Joe Koenig

No one knows Buttboard (or Trim-Tex) like Joe, and in “Drywall Minute,” you’ll be able to get your answers about Buttboard and beyond straight from the source!

Buttboard Drywall Backer is an ingenious drywall accessory that tapers inward toward its middle line. By landing your drywall’s butt joints onto Buttboard rather than studs, you essentially suck the drywall edges back, creating a void that you can fill with your tape and mud. Without Buttboard, those butt joints would take far more time and material to finish — Buttboard turns you into a lean, mean drywall finishing machine.

What Is Buttboard - Drywall 101 The 6 Levels of Drywall Finishing

For those who may believe that landing your drywall edges on Buttboard between your studs, rather than on the studs themselves, creates a weaker butt joint, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, as Joe explains above, when you’re landing a butt joint on a stud, you’ve only got about an inch-and-a-half of real estate to screw in each sheet of drywall. The tight proximity of these toenail screws to the edges of both your stud and your drywall sheets frequently leads to cracks/fractures in your drywall finish, as seen below, especially as the structure moves over time.

By landing your sheets on Buttboard Drywall Backer instead, you’re able to move those screws back an inch away from the edge of the board, eliminating this risk of cracking. Combine that benefit with your time and materials savings, and using Buttboard to create perfectly flat walls is a no-brainer.

These are the answers to just a few of the questions we receive about Buttboard. (For more answers to more advanced questions, check out this handy article.) But what do you want to know about Buttboard Drywall Backer? Use the button below to head to our Instagram page, where you can leave us a comment or send us a DM with your question, and we’ll try to answer it in a future episode of “Drywall Minute”! Don’t have Instagram? Drop us a line here!

What Do You Want to Know About Buttboard Drywall Backer?

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