How to Use the 3M M3000 Hand Masker | Faster Painting with FrogTape® Precision!

All right, this video I'm going to show you how to, you know, load up a 3M M3000 hand masker right here. Probably one of the top three greatest inventions, you know, for painters ever invented. Now, there are other versions that are starting to show up now after a lot of years. All of them are total junk. I mean, this is the only one that I'd ever invest my money in, and I have lots of them. If you're a professional painter, you should have a minimum of two, probably like six. If you're a homeowner, have one. I recommend having two. One for paper and one for plastic. But this thing will make you faster and more efficient, you know, as a painter, and it's going to make your masking process simple and easy. Now, this masker, you can use it for paper and plastic. Uh, sometimes it comes with a blade, sometimes it does not come with a blade. This blade is what we call a film blade. So, it will cut plastic and paper. Extremely sharp. I've cut myself already twice today. So, it is razor sharp. They uh there's paper blades that won't cut you, but I only use as a professional painter all my maskers and I probably got like 30 of them. They all have um film blades on them. No paper blades because paper won't cut plastic. And so I don't want to sit there and be trying to, you know, grab grabbing the wrong one or trying to find the right blade, etc. We just have one. There is a guard on it that will keep you from getting cut. Sometimes the guards come off like within months, they eventually fatigue and break off. We just rip them off. We don't like them on there at all cuz it makes cutting the plastic a lot harder. The ladder hook is uh to me absolutely essential. It's uh it was made to actually to hang your master on a ladder. So, you're not setting it on the ground. I can just kind of like, you know, hang different places. Hence, it's why they call it, you know, a ladder hook. I mean, you just kind of like hang it. I don't know like wherever. Here's a handle right here. You just hang it on a handle. But I don't like typically hanging on ladders. I use it to, you know, hang on my pocket. So, I'll have my two maskers with me. I'm typically always masking with paper and plastic. So, I have two maskers with me at all times. It's where the film blades, if you wear shorts, I've sliced my calf open uh wearing shorts. It's one of the reasons why I don't wear shorts as a painter is to protect my legs from my masker cuz I'm masking all the time. But here's uh the masker. So, we'll show you, you know, how to load it. It has a device like here, a hinge device that keeps your paper plastic pressed down right there on the roll. Your roll itself will just load up on this device right here. So, it has kind of like two spring loed wires that um right there that actually press in that cape and hold the paper on there tightly or your plastic on there tightly. So, it's just going to slide on there like this. Now, the roll itself comes off what we call over the top. You can see that it's over the top. You don't want it coming under the bottom. It's kind of like um in my house in the bathroom, I really can't stand it when we run out of toilet paper and somebody installs a toilet paper like this. That's kind of one of my pet peeves, you know. Do you have that same pet peeve? Does a toilet paper roll go over the top or under the bottom? My preference is over the top. So, always if somebody does it wrong, I switch it. And so, your paper goes over the top. Just like that. Make sure it's pressed all the way on. If there's even like a quarter inch gap right there, it's going to cause a problem with your paper, plastic, and especially plastic loading. So, it's pressed on all the way. Ready to go. So, I can take now my tape and I can load my tape on there. Your blade is adjustable. I'll talk about the blade in a minute, how you can adjust it. Tape, same thing. Over the top. You don't want it coming under the bottom. Toilet paper should always be installed over the top. So, it goes on over the top. Same thing. It has to be installed all the way tightly. If it's not all the way tightly, you're going to have a problem with your tape wobbling and not going onto the paper correctly. So, now I've got two devices. I've got a pen like sticking out right there. The tape goes underneath that pen. There's actually arrows that point you in that direction. It's like tape directions. So now the tape is going under the pen and then it goes onto the paper or plastic. And then this device, it's going to go underneath that right there. So that's critical. There's another pen and that pen is sitting on top. It feeds underneath that. So I just grab it. I just fed it underneath. Now that's pressing the paper uh and the tape together or it would be the um tape and the plastic together and it's loaded and ready to go. Now the blade, you can see the blade how it sticks up higher than the tape. So you can adjust that blade if you don't want that blade sticking out, you know, that far. It's not a problem having it sticking out too far. If it's not sticking out far enough, it'll cut everything and then all of a sudden um there'll be the p the tape sticking up too high. Then it'll cut it like you'll just randomly tear it someplace. So, you're going to rotate this blade off and you got to be careful. Um right there, just like that. You got to be really careful to rotate it off cuz it's sharp. And um I'll show you how sharp it is. So, um, now I can line it up and it actually tells you right there, you know, the sizes that there's arrows that point to what size P, um, tape you actually line it up to. And it says right there, 90 94 in. That's what I'm using right there. 94 in. Just like that. So, right there to to rotate it off. 94 in. That doesn't sound right. No. 94 mm. Millime. Um, that's a big roller. Yeah. Um. Oh my gosh. That's how sharp it is. Yeah. So, that's how sharp the blade actually is, you know, right there. So, you got to be careful when like you rotating it off. So, um, it just kind of it rotates off. You can take off your paper and rotate your blade. Not grab it by Actually, I grabbed it on the wrong end. It's like I I never change these blades. So, let me Yeah, I'll do So, in order to remove the blade, you're going to grab it from the bottom side like this and rotate it off. So, what you don't want to do when I put it back on, I'm going to put put my fingers underneath, snap it in. What you don't want to do is grab it from this side and rotate it off and snap it off because what happens is you do that. So, just to show you, you know, and give you an example what happens. So, grab it from the bottom side right here. Rotate it and it just comes right off. Pretty simple. So, that's kind of how sharp it is. So, I'll line it up cuz I'm using, you know, 1 in tape. So, I'm going to line it it, get my inch tape on. You can see how it lines up now with the inch tape and cuts. But what happens if I now if I put 2 in tape or inch and a half tape on cuz my blade is set, you know, for inch tape, it'll tear inch tape perfect every time. But what happens? So you'll swap it out with inch. And this is why we set our blades for inch and a half and we never change them. And and what happens is if you don't get accustomed to changing the blades, see how it just randomly cut it? If you don't get accustomed to changing the blades all the time, you end up doing that because you forget, you know, um how to change a blade. Literally, I haven't changed the blade. I did one for a video not that long ago, but I've changed, you know, the last time I changed a blade was probably 20 years ago. So, instead of having it set for um for inch for, you know, 1 in tape, I'm going to set it for inch and a half. Now, it'll cut inch and a half and it'll cut 1 in. And typically on our masters, we're only running inch tape at all times. I rare I it's very rare that I ever put inch and a half tape on there. So now you can see it's cutting both just the blade sticks out a little bit more and that's never a problem. So that's how you run an M3000, you know, hand masker. How you load it, how you set it up, how you be careful changing the blade. If you actually grabbed a blade like that with a um with like a paper masker, it wouldn't cut you because it's not even sharp. So, um it's not that bad. I mean, not really. Be careful setting these things around. Um it was masking in a house just recently and there was two little kids running around and the last thing you want happening is some child grabbing this thing. I'll tell you, you're going to end up in the hospital very, very fast. So, every time I would I had it, it was with me or it was sitting up high. I would set it up high where a 2-year-old can't grab a hold of it. I do put tape on the handle so I can actually grab it uh better and grip it better. The handle is, you know, smooth plastic and I wrap multiple rows of tape around it and it kind of absorbs sweat, doesn't make it slick. And so I kind of like that and it keeps the ladder hook in place, you know, a lot better. I like the ladder hook cocked to the side just like that a little bit, not going straight forward cuz it just sets in my pocket a little bit, you know, just at the right angle that I like. And so hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you got any questions about loading up or using this thing, put them in the comment section below.