Are you the chap who had a collapsing P&L ceiling? I meant to post, but have been away. I hope you raked out the top of the walls to push the boards into, sounds like it. You can either make your own thin trowel by cutting down a cheap one and rubbing up the blade on some emery cloth (these are best cut "handed", i.e. all of one side off and a bit off the other), or you can use any old cartridge (except Gripfill which are paper) - get a rod, stick it into the end of the used cartridge (unscrew nozzle first!), push the other end of the rod down on the floor until the piston is pushed out of the end of the old cartridge. Scrape out set stuff that came in the cartridge, fill with filler, grout, plaster or whatever, put piston back in, off you go.
The plaster came off the laths remarkably easily, so I decided not to take down the laths, but just screw the plasterboard over them. This seems to have worked pretty well, and the plasterer has done a magnificent job on the ceiling. I just have to fill in the remining small gap around the top of the wall. This is incredibly fiddly due to the picture rail about 40mm below the ceiling. If this had not been present then the plasterer would have just finished the top of the wall as well, but paying him for another half day or more, plus the time to make up special tools to fit in the gap didn't make economic sense.
Emptying and scraping out an old cartridge struck me as almost as much work as chucking the plaster in by hand :-( I may give it a go, though.
I see Stuart N. has posted that it doesn't work anyway - compresses instead of flowing (although cement is more likely to than plaster).
I have improved my cake icing skills by using an A4 plastic insert (one of those things for holding loose papers in a ring binder) which is much tougher plastic and opens up nice and wide at the top making it reasonably easy to fill.
Not as accurate as a cartridge, but at least half way acceptable. Much easier to handle than a plastic bag.
I have a variety of cheap trowel things coming from Screwfix, plus an angle grinder to aid in the surgery, so I should be able to make a finishing float to smooth off the final layer of plaster once I have filled the deep groove with patching plaster.
Can't see it in the current catalogue although I'm sure it was in there until quite recently. I wouldn't bother though. The only things that lend themselves to cartridges are creamy and totally uniform, like acrylics etc (things you couldn't easily get in there in the first place).
Axminster have an item in their latest brochure which altho' it say s is for mortar and grout and may also be too big for what you are wanting to do ,might be worth a look . It's called a Marshalltown Grout bag -product code 378184 but I cant see it on the website -maybe too new . It is made of black vinyl,600mm long x
2225mm wide at the top with a 9.5mm exit hole witha steel nozzle. Stuart
Interesting. I have successfully and easily used finish plaster, tile grout, decorater's filler (also same with a bit of PVA in it, also same with a little sand). I think it must depend on the plasticity of the stuff - mortar will not flow, as you correctly say! I keep a few empty cartridges of decorater's caulk which is easy to clean out of cartridges, and a few spare new nozzles too for occasional use like this.
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