Serious question, when did everyone stop buttering the hardie?

I remember back in 2019 on a job in Spokane, my old foreman would have us butter every single piece of hardie plank before nailing it off... said it kept the seams from cracking in the dry summers. We'd go through buckets of modified thinset like it was nothing. Now I see guys just butt-jointing the boards with a 1/8 gap and hoping for the best. Last month I walked a house in Boise where every single seam was already starting to check after just two seasons. The builder blamed the material, but I could tell nobody had buttered a single board. So what gives - are y'all just trusting the fiber cement now, or did I miss a memo where the install methods changed?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai77921d agoMost Upvoted

Never hear anyone talk about how the fasteners themselves have changed though. Back when we buttered everything, everybody was still using ring shank nails with the little rubber washer, and they held way better than what passes for roofing nails now. I been on a few tear-offs where the newer galvanized smooth shanks just rattle loose after a season of freeze thaw. If you ain't buttering those boards, at least make sure your nail gun is set right and you're using the good fasteners, not the cheap bulk box stuff.

casey_campbell22d ago

That business about your foreman buttering every board... that's the way I learned too, back when fiber cement was newer and nobody fully trusted it. I think what you're seeing is just part of a bigger pattern where shortcuts become accepted practice because they save time and nobody calls it out until things fail. It's like how people stopped priming interior trim before painting, or stopped using backer rod in caulking joints. The material itself might be better now, but if you skip the prep work that kept things stable through temperature swings, you're going to get the same cracking results every time. I'd love to see a manufacturer actually stand behind a warranty on an unbuttered install just to see how quickly they'd backpedal.