Cork is Down
Moving at a snails pace, or more precisely at the pace the caulk dries, I finally completed laying the cork sheets down across the entire Staging deck. This took about a week, as I worked in stages, couple of hours each day after work, and letting it dry overnight.
Before starting with the cork, I did a bit of research (a re-fresher) on what people most commonly use as an adhesive. Many just use white or yellow carpenter’s glue, others use No More Nails or similar, while the third group uses some kind of acrylic caulk. After sleeping on it I realized that the whole point of putting the cork down is to dull the noise thus using carpenter’s glue would defeat the purpose (it would dry hard and transfer vibrations to plywood and metal benchwork).
The area without the cork to the left is where the helix will be located
So, I opted for acrylic latex caulk, as it never fully dries and remains flexible. From there, my choice narrowed down to silicone free caulk, namely Dap Painter’s All-Purpose Acrylic Latex Caulk, after reading a few posts on forums where people suggest using it. Others have used various versions of silicone based ones, such as Dap Dynaflex 230, but I thought plastic only would be the best (sans-silicone).
Naturally, local Home Despot does not sell individual tubes of Painter’s caulk, and I had to buy a contractor’s pack (of 12), last one out of the two. The other one was opened and someone took one tube out, breaking the pack…sigh.
Originally I was looking to get cork from a big box store, but that proved difficult as they did not carry any cork products alone (they had cork and vapour barrier together). Online wasn’t any better either since prices were very high due to shipping costs, and I needed a big roll, etc. I lucked out to find a good source of cork (from Portugal) near-by where I live (amazing) from a flooring place. Why didn’t I think of that right away?!
I ended up buying 35 2’x3′ sheets of 4 mm cork at $0.75 per sq./ft. (great price), since they did not have enough of 6 mm. They asked me at the store whether I was doing a floor in a condo and I said no, it’s for a model railroad, which truly amused them. One of the sales guys there actually had a model railroader friend so he knew what I was talking about.
In retrospect, 4 mm was plentiful and will do the job. Furthermore, I’m left with 8 sheets that I can use elsewhere, so the next question is whether I should be laying cork down on the helix or not…