The war with the ants continues. I had to apply more sealant a few days ago but this time around, I went and purchased “tooling”. It’s essentially just a few pieces of soft plastic that you press and drag along the bead. The plastic is cut into the shape of the bead you want. It can be an angled straight bead or a curved one. Here’s an example of the tooling I’m talking about. The tool scrapes up any extra sealant and pushes sealant into the gap or joint as well. The key is to use just enough material to make a proper sized bead but not too much though, because you just wind up scraping it off and wasting it.
The picture above should show you what a difference having the proper tool makes. The picture on the left is just the bead I did by hand, using no tooling. It just looks messy. The picture on the right almost looks like I didn’t even use any sealant at all. The angle and lighting made it difficult to show but there’s a straight and thin line of sealant along the moulding. It looks much more professional.
The right thing to do is to eventually remove all the badly applied sealant and then redo it with proper tooling. For now though, it’s not the plan, because despite my best efforts, the ants continue to find new ways in.
As I feared, it’s just a never-ending back and forth now.