On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:39:34 +0000 (UTC),
(Andrew Gabriel) wrote:

It's called metal lath.
You would want stainless steel, not galvanised, near a window,
and stainless steel fixings. It's a complete ******* to handle.
Comes in 8'x3' sheets, and every edge is like a giant razor blade,
and even the surface is like a giant cheese grater. I used some a
few months ago, and in spite of being careful, I still managed
to cut myself several times. You don't even know you've done it,
as mostly it's completely painless at the time. Then you notice
things are getting blood on them, and you've got blood on your
hands, and you start trying to work out where it's coming from.
It's probably a bit thick for what you want, and it doesn't
necessarily lay very flat against the surface, so I'm not sure
you'd achieve significantly less than 9mm with it.

I thought that if I used 6mm plasterbaord rather than 12.5mm, that a
saving of 6mm would be quite significant. I could only find 6mm
plasterboard on lafarge's web site, not on British Gypsum or Knauff's.
When I called Lafarge's freephone number to find a stockist, the lady
told me they didn't make 6mm plasterboard. I tried to explain that
they made a 6mm contourboard and that it was on their website but in
the end I hung up in frustration because she wouldn't believe me!

I phoned around a lot of builder's merchants and no-one had any and
no-one was interested in finding any. I did eventually find someone
with just four sheets in stock but they wanted 19gbp plus VAT. So I
decided that the 3mm difference between 6mm and 9mm plasterboard would
not be noticeable and bought 9.5mm PB for a fifth of that cost and
used that instead.

I had thought a lath may have allowed me to go thinner but like you
said, the idea of cutting it and it cutting me put me off and being
new to plaster, I wasn't use how easy it would be for a novice to
skim?

BTW I have bought a couple of angle beads to use. Do you hold these in
place with a couple of plasterboard screws, glue (no more tails type
of thing), or just push them into the wet plaster?

Thanks.