Pointing is Perfection

Pointing is the act of filling the joint in plaster pieces. In order to connect the pieces to look like one continuous segment, the joint needs to be clean and perfectly matched up. There are many different steps to pointing. When pointing, it is best to use a material that is easily workable that doesn't dry out too fast. This is referred to a "retarded" mixture. To create it, you use a special mixture of water and rabbit skin so create a pasty texture. The rabbit skin allows the plaster to be workable for a longer amount of time. 

The first step is making a surface to apply your plaster to. We made a temporary board just for practice. We screwed a piece of sheet rock to some plywood for support. 

We choose our piece that we wanted to practice on and using a saw we cut it so we had 3 pieces. One piece with 2 straight edges and the other two pieces had 45° angles. The pieces had to be lined up so that we could mark the board for guidance once we took off our pieces to apply the plaster. 

Its important to scratch up any of the edges that will have plaster on them. This helps the plaster have something to stick to and make the pieces hold together better. Once all the edges are "roughed up", they need to be submerged into water so that the dry plaster doesn't pull all of the moisture out of the wet plaster too quickly to be worked. 

The next step is to apply a thin layer of plaster onto the plaster  piece. This layer should be evenly spread about 1/8 of an inch. After that, it can be applied to the board and the excess plaster can be cleaned from the edge. For applying the next piece, not only the bottom needs buttered, but also the edge where the joints are going to match up. The joint between the pieces should be around 1/4 inch which is marked when the pieces are laid out in place. It is important to make sure all of the surfaces of the pieces line up and are level before the plaster dries. 

Once everything is lined up and even, you can start the actual pointing process.  The plaster mix dries quickly so before applying more you have to spray the joints so it doesn't pull all of the moisture out too quickly. Once the water is completely soaked up, you can apply the plaster mix on the joint using precision tools and smoothly peeling it off using a "scraper" as shown above. 

This is me using my tool to scrape off the excess plaster.  This scraper has an extremely fine straight edge and is easy for scraping off unwanted material. You repeat this step normally 3 times or until the joint is completely smooth and invisible.