Drilling in to horsehair rendered wall

JustAnotherSaver

I'm going to assume it's horsehair. It certainly was in the living room when we had to knock it all off. 1930s house.

Anyway in the box room which is pretty much the PC room, I'm considering putting up shelving to get the printer off the floor.

Little concerned regards drilling in to this though.

Reason being - when I set the room up as a PC room & ran the extension cable, I went to mount that on the wall. As I drilled in the bit just went through like there was nothing there & started opening up a whopping hole.

Now that wasn't too bad as it was down near the skirting & is out of sight now. Where I am considering putting the shelving is going to be totally on view & if the same happens then it'll look crap.

So is there something I likely did wrong last time round that I need to be avoiding this time? Basically I was just going to drill a hole, stick a rawl plug in, put a screw in & hang the extension on it (ok I'd actually put 2 in but since it failed on the first....).

And while I'm at it, what about hanging things on plaster & lath walls? I'm going to assume that this is what the interior walls are made of. I'm not looking at hanging anything heavy like a printer there on these walls (that's go on the exterior one that I'm guessing is horsehair rendered) but while I'm asking about that I may as well ask if there's a certain way you should approach the plaster & lath walls for hanging things?

stuart45

Fix into the studs.

FreeBear

Internal walls, as stuart45 says, fix to the studs - Finding them is the <ahem> fun part.... If you have a pipe/cable detector, you might be able to locate the nails used to fix the laths to the uprights.

On external walls, it is a bit of a crap shoot as to whether you hit a mortar joint or solid brick - If your place is anything like mine, putting rawl plugs in a mortar joint is not a good idea as the mortar doesn't have any strength to it - I have resorted to using resin fixings when I need something to stay fixed to the wall.

JustAnotherSaver

I had to Google resin fixings.

Going off what it's thrown up, if you mean something like Gripfill then I tried that. Probably did it wrong though. I basically pumped the hole full of it (took an absolute load) and put the rawl plug in. Waste of time. As I say, that's probably not the way to do it because I have a knack for doing things wrong.

So that's what you think the problem likely was last time round then - I just hit a joint rather than anything solid?

Here's a question while i'm on it....

I have a bookshelf cabinet thing on the side wall. It came with a fixing to screw to the wall to basically stop it toppling over. IIRC it came with a couple actually because I'm sure I got one in.

Anyway, I went to drill one in & my drill just wouldn't entertain the wall. It would elsewhere but in the spot that I was trying to drill for this 1 screw it just wouldn't do a thing. I had it on hammer & I was putting some serious force on but it just did nothing.

After stopping it was like there was metal as part of the wall. It was shiny silver whatever it was. It was weird.

Any clue?

casper_gutman

When drilling into a lath and plaster wall you're highly likely to hit a lath, which is actually a reasonably chunky piece of wood. A masonry drill/hammer action won't get you very far. The lath will probably vibrate which means the drill won't get anywhere much, and even if you drill the hole successfully plugs or plasterboard fixings are unlikely to give a decent result.

When I want to fix something light, like a small picture, I tend to drill a small pilot hole with a wood drill. The plaster on these old walls isn't usually hard enough for this to be a problem. If I happen to hit a stud, then great! If the drill goes into a lath then a screw can bite into that reasonably well and it actually gives a perfectly good result for smaller loads.

With a larger load, you really need to be fixing into a stud, though. This may mean drilling a fair few small holes to find one, and you might have to use battens to hang your shelf (or whatever) if the studs aren't exactly where you need them to be.

JustAnotherSaver

Was any of that in reply to what I said at the end of my last post?

I felt like your opener was, but that perhaps we got crossed wires. When I had the bother drilling in to the wall, it was on an external wall (there's 2 in this PC room). The external side wall.

Anyway I was coming back to the thread for the earlier suggestion of a stud finder as I thought it'd be beeping like crazy since the slats are wood as well as any uprights

but i've just re-read and it was a pipe/cable detector that was mentioned, so forget that

FreeBear

JustAnotherSaver said: Going off what it's thrown up, if you mean something like Gripfill then I tried that.

Anyway, I went to drill one in & my drill just wouldn't entertain the wall. It would elsewhere but in the spot that I was trying to drill for this 1 screw it just wouldn't do a thing. I had it on hammer & I was putting some serious force on but it just did nothing.

Resin fixing - https://www.screwfix.com/p/easyfix-kem-psc-175-ef-chemical-resin-175ml/5650j - Others available.

As for the real tough part of the wall - Was it anywhere near the top of a window ?

Over some of my windows, there is a ruddy great lump of concrete about 150mm high, and extending ~150mm either side. Drilling in to this stuff requires an SDS drill ! Or you could have a steel lintel, which would be easy enough to drill through with an ordinary twist bit (but not on hammer). Start with a small hole (3mm), then go in with a larger drill bit. Make sure they are sharp though.

stuart45

JustAnotherSaver said:

I had to Google resin fixings.

Going off what it's thrown up, if you mean something like Gripfill then I tried that. Probably did it wrong though. I basically pumped the hole full of it (took an absolute load) and put the rawl plug in. Waste of time. As I say, that's probably not the way to do it because I have a knack for doing things wrong.

So that's what you think the problem likely was last time round then - I just hit a joint rather than anything solid?

Here's a question while i'm on it....

I have a bookshelf cabinet thing on the side wall. It came with a fixing to screw to the wall to basically stop it toppling over. IIRC it came with a couple actually because I'm sure I got one in.

Anyway, I went to drill one in & my drill just wouldn't entertain the wall. It would elsewhere but in the spot that I was trying to drill for this 1 screw it just wouldn't do a thing. I had it on hammer & I was putting some serious force on but it just did nothing.

After stopping it was like there was metal as part of the wall. It was shiny silver whatever it was. It was weird.

Any clue?

If your external wall is a cavity wall you might have hit a wall tie.
I would think that FreeBear meant a 2 part resin, rather than Gripfill.
Could be if you went into a partly filled cross joint the Gripfill was going into the cavity.

JustAnotherSaver

@FreeBear - no no window. It's the side wall of the house that's just a blank wall. Possibly about a foot down from the ceiling I was drilling. Well, trying to drill.

casper_gutman

JustAnotherSaver said:

Was any of that in reply to what I said at the end of my last post?

I felt like your opener was, but that perhaps we got crossed wires. When I had the bother drilling in to the wall, it was on an external wall (there's 2 in this PC room). The external side wall.

Anyway I was coming back to the thread for the earlier suggestion of a stud finder as I thought it'd be beeping like crazy since the slats are wood as well as any uprights

but i've just re-read and it was a pipe/cable detector that was mentioned, so forget that

Ah, sorry - I wasn't really replying to your most recent post, more of a general brain dump about lath and plaster walls!

Could the metal you encountered have been cable capping like this? https://www.screwfix.com/p/tower-25mm-channel-2m/67599

Are there any sockets or switches in the area?

JustAnotherSaver

No that's the thing, it's just a blank wall. I guess it'll be one of those "oh well I don't know then" which to be fair, I'd be pretty amazed if anyone did know the answer without having a look. I was just chancing it really.

In here aside from it being a shell, there's a radiator & 1 electrical point. The piping to the rad is under the floor & I imagine the electrical wiring comes up that way as well only running upwards to a light switch which is on a separate wall entirely.