1. Your caulking bead can stay neat and even.
Here is a trick to keeping that caulking bead looking straight and clean. Use masking tape to tape off the areas around the seam you are caulking, keeping the two pieces of tape at a distance the size of the desired bead. Lay down your bead of caulk. Use your finger to tool the caulk by pushing the excess onto the tape. After tooling, you can remove the masking tape and you'll find a very nice looking, straight, clean, smooth bead of tooled caulk.
2. Car polish can give your shower a great shine.
Next time you clean your bathroom, get out your car polish. Rub a coat of polish on your ceramic or fiberglass shower enclosure. You’ll get a wonderful shine and the water will bead up and roll off before mildew or mold can begin to form. It will make your next cleaning time a lot easier. However, DO NOT apply car polish the floor of the shower - it would become a slippery place for an accident ready to happen.
3. A paint stick is a great tool for smoothing caulk.
After you lay your bead of caulk, determine the width you want from tooling and mask it off with masking tape. Next, take a paint stick and clip off the corners to fit the desired width between the two pieces of masking tape. Smooth out the bead of caulk with the paint stick.
4. There is a way to unplug a used tube of caulk.
Take the tube and cut off the nozzle end so that the hole is slightly larger than the first cut. Next, drive a screw into the nozzle end of the hardened caulk and use the screw to pull the hardened caulk out of the nozzle. A screw with course threads, such as drywall or deck screws, will work the best.
5. Your chipped ceramic tile can be repaired.
It’s very simple. All you need is appliance touchup paint. This paint dries to a very hard finish and adheres well to smooth surfaces. Appliance paint comes in only a few colors (white, almond, green, yellow and back) but it can be tinted with other paint to match your tile.
6. You can cap-off your used cartridge of caulk.
You just finished your caulking job and there’s product still left over in the tube. Here’s a couple of quick ways to store your cartridge for later use:
- A plastic electrical connector is an easy way to quickly seal and reopen the tube.
- If you can’t find a connector, place a 2" nail into the end of the nozzle, then wrap the entire nozzle tightly in Saran Wrap® or Reynolds Wrap®. This will keep the caulk in the nozzle from hardening for use at a later date.
7. Sun-damaged wood fibers can cause adhesion failure in caulks.
Surface wood fibers can be appreciably damaged in as little as 2-4 weeks when exposed to direct, intense sunlight. This has been determined by the USDA's Forest Products Research Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin (in repeated studies over many years). If a sealant (or a coating) is applied to such damaged wood, it can lead to premature failure of the sealant (or coating) because the sealant can much more readily lose its adhesion. (In reality, the sealant adheres quite well to the surface wood fibers themselves, but the surface fibers lose their attachment to the bulk of the wood.)
8. Oil-based caulking compounds can cause windows to "fog up."
Make sure you never use an oil-based caulking compound around insulating glass ("thermal-pane") windows. The vegetable oils in these types of caulking compounds aggressively attack polysulfide polymers (the primary sealants used for such windows). The polysulfide degrades, cracks and causes the window to fail and "fog up".
9. Shrinkage of a caulking bead is not necessarily bad.
Sometimes "shrinkage" of a caulking bead is thought to potentially lead to performance problems with the sealant. While this can occur with some types of sealants (silicones and polyurethanes, for instance), for many other types of sealants it does not pose a real performance problem. Such products as Acrylic Latex, Butyl, SBR, Polysulfide, and others do not suffer severe performance problems when they experience a moderate amount of shrinkage during their cure.
10. Elastomeric latex caulks need 1-3 days to cure.
Always give elastomeric latex caulks plenty of time (1-3 days) to cure before painting them. The reason is that these types of caulk are much more elastic than any paint that is applied over them and the paint can't stretch enough to avoid cracking during the caulk's curing (and subsequent shrinkage).
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