Product Spotlight: Trim-Tex "Built for Movement" and Aesthetic Trim Series

This product spotlight is excerpted from a recent episode of Building Resilience, from ProTradeCraft. Host Michael Anschel examines a handful of Trim-Tex products for drywall finishing, including corner beads, archways, and products that allow for wood movement without causing drywall cracks.

Outside corner options

We're looking at a couple of solutions from Trim-Tex. And some of them look very similar to what we're used to. Like this one is an outside corner, it comes in a bunch of different profiles—very crisp, sharp, one to a soft bullnose to a bigger bullnose, which is a cool look.

Some of the advantages that these have over metal are that they don't rust. That's a big deal. They don't dent. And if you've been in this industry for a while, you know that dented metal is a real thing. There's also a lot less embodied energy in one of these, which I think is a bonus. And they use a lot less mud than traditional trims, which we'll get into a little bit later.

Inside corners have built-in mud-guages 

So, that's the outside corner. Of course, there's a flexible outside corner, which is very, very cool—like when we're doing arches and niches and fun stuff like that.

Our inside corner, though, is kind of next level. Traditional inside corner, you know, you flex it to get it to be the shape of your inside corner. So there I've got a nice 90 degrees. But you'll notice that one of the things that they've done here is they've got this raised edge lip. And that lip means that I can set my drywall knife right in there without fear of ripping the paper as I lay my bead. And my mud is going to be the thickness of that lip, which is then going to get painted.

So I can have a really crisp, clean corner without worrying about ripping that paper tape. That's a pretty cool solution.

Drywall beads that are made for movement

The last category that I want to talk about is maybe the most exciting, which is their Made for Movement category. And there are a dozen products in there that do various things. The two that I'm going to take a look at today are their truss uplift and their flexible corner, which I think they call a Magic Corner.

Truss uplift  angle hides truss movement

This one is our truss uplift bead. We're going to attach this one so that this side is nailed off to the wall. And this piece here is going to be underneath our trusses. What we do when we install the drywall is we install the lid to this flange rather than to the truss itself. And the first screw is actually like 18 inches out in the field.

And so what that means is I have a floating corner. As the trusses move, if I've got big spans, this is going to keep that corner from cracking. And everybody hates warranty work, and that's one way that you make sure that your product stays looking good.

Corner bead that allows movement

Now, this one is really cool. This is a flexible Magic Corner. You can see it's got that gasket that can move back and forth. So imagine you're doing a big vaulted ceiling. You've got that long line near the ceiling where it flattens out a little bit, or at the knee wall, or just a funky corner in general where the roof load is meeting wall load and things are moving around.

This is a corner that's going to flex depending on what kind of angle you've designed. It's not an excuse for bad framing, but this is a way to be more creative with your use of drywall.