Field Register Drywall Insider

Drywall Insider

Products for drywall and wall-and-ceiling shops

This is the product door for estimators and PMs — what a drywall shop actually buys, stocks, and puts on a submittal. It is not a box-store catalog and not a list of invented model numbers. Manufacturer pages are editorial stubs: official website and what they make.

Commercial wall-and-ceiling packages and residential production use overlapping SKUs and different mixes. A 5/8 Type X corridor and a 1/2-inch house ceiling are not the same truck.

Scope archives live under Directory. Takeoff language lives under Topics.

Board

Interior gypsum, fire-rated cores, shaftliner, glass-mat interiors, and exterior gypsum sheathing. Paper-faced interiors are generally ASTM C1396. Abuse/impact classification is ASTM C1629. The listed UL / GA-600 design names the product; “5/8 firecode” is not a substitution license.

Residential production lives on 1/2-inch regular and sag-resistant ceiling board. Commercial interiors default to 5/8 Type X even on some non-rated walls because one thickness simplifies the floor. Shaftliner is a 1-inch liner panel, not ripped wallboard.

Steel framing

Interior light-gauge (the drywall stud) and exterior / structural cold-formed steel. Same mills, different ASTM families, different bid. Interior nonstructural members are ASTM C645 / AISI S220; structural members are ASTM C955 / AISI S240. EQ drywall stud is not a silent upgrade to structural 20-ga.

The metal-stud partition is usually in the commercial drywall number. Exterior CFS and load-bearing backup often are not — confirm the package before the takeoff treats them as one stick count.

Insulation

Fiberglass batt, sound-attenuation batts, mineral wool, and related products that ride inside the commercial drywall number — and on the residential side when the contract includes them. Mineral wool shows up in shaft, area-separation, and head-of-wall details the drywall sub has to coordinate even when firestop is a separate trade.

Pull R-values, STC claims, and assembly notes from the manufacturer. Do not copy a number onto a bid from memory.

Fasteners

Board-to-steel, board-to-wood, gypsum-to-gypsum, and metal-to-metal. ASTM C1002 is the self-piercing family: Type S (fine thread) into light-gauge steel, Type W (coarse) into wood, Type G for laminating board to board. Heavier steel wants ASTM C954 (Type S-12 class) self-drilling points. Collated coils belong on production hang; they do not excuse the wrong thread.

Finishing systems

Joint compound, tape, paper- and vinyl-faced beads, control-joint trims, texture materials, and Level 5 / skim systems. Finish level is GA-214. Control-joint profiles are how a GA-216 gap becomes a finished wall instead of a raw kerf.

A commercial Level 4 corridor and a residential knockdown over Level 3 are different compound counts. Glass-mat faces have their own skim or primer-surfacer systems — follow the board manufacturer.

Tools

Production gear: depth-sensitive screw guns and collated systems, panel lifts, stilts and benches, automatic tapers and boxes, hoppers, lasers. Not a consumer kit wall. Board and stud still come from the gypsum house; this is the other truck.

Residential production and commercial wall-and-ceiling shops run different mixes — knife-and-pan vs ATF, stilts vs lifts, Type W coils vs Type S.