Hardest Texture Materrial

Which gets harder for a knockdown texture. Texture material in a bag to mix with water? Thinned down joint compound and if JC which kind?

 

IMO the hardest finish would be regular Durabond 90 in the brown bag. However it's a hot mud (fast setting) and cleaning out equipment might be a pain. It's not easy to sand.

I imagine it would be about like using a Venitian plaster, which i have never done.

Next would be lightweight setting compound, like easy sand 90. (Also hot mud) As the name indicates, it's easier to sand... and you often want to lightly sand knockdown to remove any trowel or knife marks.

Regular premixed joint compound in either bucket or box would be similar in hardness to Tuf-tex or other dry texture products because you also need to thin joint compound down to use it as texture. Tuf-tex directions say you can mix a bag with up to 1 gallon of First Coat for additional hardness. (Just like mixing paint with your texture, it becomes a real xxxxx to try to sand off or remove later.)

Knockdown is usually best done with either a hopper... let it flash slightly before troweling it... or roll it on with a roller, stomp it with a crows foot brush, then lightly trowel it.

 

Thanks,
I do a lot of patching and I have used EasySand or its kind for knockdown a lot. I flick the texture off of a dash brush and then with good timing it knocks down just fine. But this is a larger job and I don't want the extra work to clean the hopper. That is the reason I was asking. I'll probably use a dry texture. I can mix only what I need and not have to worry about the rest of the stuff spoiling in a bucket.
Which makes me think of another question. Would a little bleach in the mix keep mud from spoiling, souring, molding or what ever it does when it sets in a bucket a while? Would a little bleach ruin the mud for future use?

 

I have never tried adding bleach. I'm not too worried about losing $5 worth of mud to mold. Only mixing what you need is the best solution to that.

 

Time was I did a lot of EIFS work. The finish material always had an ammonia odor when I opened the bucket. I heard but I don't know how reliable the source was that there was some ammonia in the mix to help preserve it. I never had any of that stuff spoil after even months in the bucket. Sometimes I just get curious about things. Yes, I thought about ammonia in the mud rather than bleach. Just academic curiosity.

 

It probably does contain mold inhibiters... seems to me like adding tap water to premixed mud accelerates mold, but if you leave it as is... don't put used mud back into the bucket... place a layer of plastic (use an empty bucket as a pattern to cut a circle out of plastic) on top of the mud to seal it from air, that helps prevent mold in the bucket.

 

Normally if there is mold in the bucket it's at the top and I'll just scoop out and toss the moldy portion. As X stated, mud is too cheap to worry about.