😳Using a Stud Finder, "Correctly"

madness that finder doesn't work that one doesn't work and even this fancy ones not working maybe you're in that boat well I'm gonna show you why they all work you're just using them wrong and I'll explain that right after this [Music] hey thanks for stopping by my channel here at that killed your guy videos and today what I'm gonna do is explain to you why a lot of you are using these stud finder is wrong I hear this a lot and a lot of you think oh these things don't work I saw a comment on I think it was on Amazon in the review section and the guy basically said yeah this piece of crap made a really great stress reliever because I beat the crap out of it and broke it into a hundred little pieces well what's really happening is most of the time you're just not understanding how these work and I'm gonna show you with a little mock-up here how this works in just a second but for those of you who are returning welcome to my new studio this is just stage one I've got a lot more plans for it we just put this all together for you soon there's gonna be a lot more changes like some LED lighting I'm gonna back like this Air Force sign with LED lights just like I did for my wife with her sign and a whole lot more we're building a new YZ amol but this is our very first video in a new studio so welcome and one of these days soon I'm gonna walk you through when I get it further along and show you all the things we did for you so first let me get this little mock-up going here what I got is a little sample wall here with some various types of studs so that I can explain it and I made sure to stick them out the top so you can actually see what the stud finder is or isn't seen now if you like these kind of videos be sure and subscribe and I think your a lot for sharing these on your social media sites now I've been doing construction for over 35 years I first walked on a pair of stilts when I was 8 years old so I've been around it a long time and and over the years I've bought a lot of different stud finders this is three of the ones I have I actually have probably a few more about two or three more and I've got everything from this one here which I think cost around $60 to I've got one that's like seven dollars I think I don't have it out here but this one's not much more it's a really basic one and they will all work they just have a little bit different technique and you kind of have to understand what they're doing what they're telling you and how to properly use them so first of all how to stud finders work well they're not magnetic I know some of you are confused and you think they're looking for the metal screws or the nails and the studs they're not has nothing to do with that now there is stud finders that do that and all it really does is you dangle a magnet around here you move it enough and sometimes there's a little pointer thing that moves in there it senses the screws but those are terribly slow terribly inefficient because if you go right here it's not going to find it so you're like scanning all over until you find that screw these work by sending out a small signal into the wall and that signal changes when it detects different density so it's really all about the density you're calibrating it to the density of the sheetrock and when it goes along and senses a different density it's programmed so that it'll give you a signal on either the edge or the center so it's really all about detecting density difference it's not a magic trick it can't see through your sheetrock it doesn't have x-ray vision although some of you might I lost mine years ago okay I also want to talk about the two common types of detectors that as far as signaling they signal you through like little lights like this or sometimes a digital display and in addition like this one it gives you an arrow to show you what you're seeing the way it signals you is a little bit different LEDs digital display or in this case a little arrow that comes out but they all are doing the same basic thing but there's also kind of two ways they signal you for example this one is a center finder so it's going to indicate the center of the stud these are edge finders so I'm going to show you how to use both of them okay now there's several ways to find studs I'm sure some of you have heard some of these there's the old famous knock on the wall method you hear Changes sound just slightly that works ok I've used that hundreds of times when I didn't have them stud finder handy but it's not real accurate at all these are more reliable so to do the tapping method if you want to try that be a snap and listen for the hollow sound and as it gets this denser tighter sound you're getting closer when it starts going back to the hollow sound you're going away from it so you just have to kind of guess in between the second way is you could take in drive nails I've heard people say to do this yes you can fix those nails fairly easy but it's really not necessary you would just start driving nails about every inch the studs an inch and a half so if you go more than an inch and a half you might actually just surround it and miss it so drive them every inch until you find it then you got to try and find the edge so you know where the center is that's method number two and then I mentioned the magnet method that would be the third method here with this being the first one so I'm going to go ahead and show you the right way to do this okay I would recommend reading your owner's manual but the first probably most important step is to calibrate it you really can't just stick it up here and just start it may not work it probably won't work because what you're doing is you want to put it on the wall and you want to calibrate it by pushing a button waiting until you see all the display it'll come on and when it goes to the clear screen with no display it's calibrated and now this is really important when you calibrate you're calibrating for density so make sure that however you're gonna hold this you don't change your position so you don't calibrate it say like this and then change your hand position you also don't want to say calibrate it and then move your pencil into place so that you can mark it you've actually changed that calibration or a little bit I'll show you that here in a second okay so we calibrate it everything went blank we keep our hand away from it and we move slowly you don't want to move too fast you don't have to go to the creepy-crawly rate but if you go too fast you you probably will miss it so we move across here with this one you'll see that display come up you see the bar on the left and the blank spot in the middle that's indicating the left edge of the stud so as we move a little further it starts getting thicker and as it finds the center it marks it so let's mark where it marked and often it'll read a little bit whiter it doesn't come on for just a super thin slice so if you want you could mark it again we come back and check and goes off about there so let's just say it started there ended over there so right about here is the middle now you see the display here again now it's indicating that's the right edge so I'm going to mark that too and come back here and mark this left edge and we'll see how it came out okay I'm not left-handed so let me make my marks a little clearer now here's an important thing to keep in mind these don't always read real accurately on the edge I can show you how to make it read more accurately what's more important is that you get a right edge in the left edge and a middle for this style for this one one reason I like it is it said the middles right there well the middle really is right there it's pretty dang accurate it may be off by just a tiny bit now let's try the edge finder and just kind of ignore this light over here this is indicating electricity and when I do this sometime it goes off because there's lights up here it picks it's really sensitive to electricity that's supposed to help you not drill into electrical I don't usually pay attention to that because it's not real accurate so let's start over here again calibrated and I probably should have calibrated it with my hand further away so there it's indicating left edge when that top LED comes on which is about the same as that mark and right there so this one's indicating slightly further to the right and if we take the middle of that it's slightly more accurate this time these things will read slightly different each time okay so we'll check this one out come across here same way when it hits the top LED that's when this one indicates it so right there which is pretty much about the same as that mark come over here and kill it starts going away and right there which is almost exactly the same as this mark so these two these two are reading almost identical okay so the other thing I want to point out is you don't know what's inside the wall a lot of times there can be a really wide section so imagine what this could be representing is a wall going that way the wall comes over stops right here but maybe they frame from here on and from here on this could even be a two-by-four stud that's just right back here but it still might affect this reading it might make it kind of wonky because it's not really meant to read things like that but it'll read something like that now it's close to this one that could throw it off a little bit so let's demonstrate here okay it's a new left edge right there right there and and it found the center pretty decent on that one now let's see right edge it's saying about here so if you use this green and not just the arrow it still tells you what the width of that is so if you see something really wide like that that might be why it's not just screwed up now I want to show you another scenario sometimes there's two studs near each other and that can really throw them off so for example let's calibrate move across it says right edge there now when I get my hand up here it changes the calibration a little but you move it away and it's back to where it was I just screwed up and let go the button let's do it again so it's showing right edge is showing Center so it finds the first stud but now it thinks it's one big wide stud because they're so close together but if you look at the black lines watch what they're doing they're not ever really indicating the left edge until we get right here so if you use both the black lines and the arrow it found the first stud but it found the right edge in the left edge of those two studs so it still worked it just you have to kind of realize there could be that kind of framing in there it probably would have a hard time with that one unless you come from this site now I'm gonna show you how you often mess up and blame this thing so let me show you a few examples we've shown that this works when it's calibrated right but let's say you forget and I'm pointing this out because I've done this many times let's just say you calibrate from here then you go okay let me get my pencil ready and where's that mark right there see how I just do it off by that much now I move my hand I just even just getting your hand near its reading that density so you can't change the position of your left hand if you're using your right hand to hold it but you also can't do this I've done this before let's say you start out in one position and you determine you start moving and it's not comfortable so you change your hand and it may read okay and it may not now I know my fingers probably blocking it a little bit so there it just stood off a little bit it's reading the quarter-inch too far in but there's other ways you could change your position like you might decide to hold it two hands like I kind of did there so if you decide to slide it across Area C and now it's going wonky you're gonna think god this thing sucks it can't find anything you just threw the calibration all out all right let me show you another way you can make a mistake and it's not really your fault you're just not understanding the tool you don't know what's behind this wall we do that's why this is sticking out but normally you can't tell so you stick your stud finder up here and you happen to land right on or near the stud and you calibrate it now when you move Dame thing just starts flashing it's like all right try it again so you recalibrate it again and you go moving again now it goes to flashing again you probably were just on the stud it could even do that if say let's try this one I'm gonna start right near the right edge and calibrate it now see it just can't find it because it's calibrated to that stud it's calibrated to this density even if you're close to it it can still throw it off so if it if you go to scanning and you just can't find anything try moving over about three inches and do that again now this time it's going to find it so there's a couple tricks okay there's a few reasons it might not work that have nothing to do with these because these are really meant for a wall like this sheetrock not a lot behind it insulation is okay it's going to calibrate to the insulation which will stay the same basic density through there but some walls like in apartments motels things like that they have this stuff called RC channel and it's a metal strip that attaches to the wall then it comes out about a half an inch and then down and it runs this way so if you're trying to find a stud and you're scanning across there it may never find it because that's just not what it's made for if you go up and down it might find it but you'll probably be really confused thinking your Carpenter was drunk and framed your wall horizontally instead of vertical okay there's a few other reasons like there are some walls where they put OSB behind it that throw it off it could be double-layer five-eighths so if it's anything besides half inch and studs like this it could throw it off now a lot of these newer fancier ones they have a deep scan mode that's what that's for if you've got two layers extra thick wall OSB it may be able to calibrate for that extra thickness and read right past it now there could also be other things in a wall there could be pipes running in here electrical all those things could throw it off so if you're having a hard time finding a stud with one of these before you beat it up and pick on it just move it to a different location go up or down or move over if you can find a stud right here a lot of times you can just measure 16 inches try driving a nail right there it's probably their most walls are laid out on 16 inch centers so even if you can't find the one right where you want it try finding one nearby and it might help now tell you what I'm gonna put links to some of these affordable stud finders down there because they will get the job done and I'll put links to this line I think they don't make this exact one anymore but zircon makes a bunch of stud finders you can decide what features appealed to you so what do you get by moving up well like this one's really simple two LEDs it doesn't start giving you as much notice in advance of the stud until you get there this one gives you more LEDs you get a little more fine-tuning because you see it coming up and there's even one out there I think it's pretty cool it's a bar with a whole bunch of LEDs and you just slide it so really they'll all do the job of finding the stud but what you get like on this one is a digital display and it tells you things like the left edge right edge but it also tells you if you're in deep scan mode if there's electrical hazards this one gives you the battery strength indicator and so on so you just get a little bit more deluxe features out of it this is by far my favorite I love the center finding I don't have to hunt and peck for the the two edges in the middle I just go for the center mark it it's done the little arrows kind of cool too so hey if you liked this video be sure and subscribe and share this video with your friends share it on social media we love it when you share videos and comment down below if you've got any questions if I left something out let me know otherwise I thank you for stopping by as always and I'll see you on the next video take care and remember do it right

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 358,166

Rating: 4.8747096 out of 5

Keywords: stud finder, stud locator, how to use a stud finder, how to find a stud, finding studs in the wall, how to find wall studs, how to use a stud finder stanley, how to use a stud finder zircon, how to use a stud finder craftsman, how to use a stud finder hart, how to use a stud finder black and decker, how to use a stud finder dewalt, why does my stud finder not work, how to use a stud finder correctly, stud finder false reading, how to get my stud finder to work

Id: cTnlU-4cP0w

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020