Some Simple DIY Tips for Wall Plugs / Anchors!

so there I was about to make a video about some of the more advanced wall fixings and wall anchors and plugs that are available on the market these days and I realized you know I haven't given you some of the most basic tips of how to get the most out of your humble bog-standard yellow red and brown plastic wall plugs welcome back to the Gosforth handyman tips library so before I start I'm just gonna be talking about yellow red and brown wall plugs in the UK that get called wall plugs I know in America oh you called them anchors or something weird like that but these are generally only for use in solid walls and I'm gonna be showing you stuff today into a concrete block it's a 7.3 Newton concrete block I'm not gonna be talking about hollow walls plaster boards drywall anything like that not in today's video I'm also not gonna be talking about Thermolite or any of your kind of lightweight aerated concrete blocks they're a whole different ballgame you can have a bash at using these in Thermolite if you want but mm-hmm we'll come back to that that's a bit of a different thing these particular ones I'm showing you here are all made by Fisher this isn't sponsored by Fisher so we've got here your five millimeter yellow plugs six millimeter red plugs and eight millimeter brown plugs I am well aware that you can get brown plugs that are also in seven mil not these ones these are 8 mil they've got a number 8 written on them drill bit wise with something like this you're generally going to be using a 6 mil masonry bit for the red plugs an 8 mil masonry bit for the brown plugs or a 5 mil masonry bit for the yellow plugs if you're going to be using an STS drill and I'll make a different video about that at some point I would generally go half a mil down because the vibration of the SDS drill can just cause a hole to be slightly bigger than needed and worst case you can always do the whole half a mil smaller and then come to it with a combi drill with the correct sized hole and it's better to do that then to use like a 6 mil SDS bit and find that you've made the hole a bit too big very very rare that I would be using an SDS for a yellow plug and to be honest it's very rare that I use the brown plugs anyway we'll come back to that in terms of screw sizes always go by the manufacturers datasheet these ones Fischer recommend three to four mil screw for the yellow plugs a four to five mil screw for the red plugs and a four and a half to six mil screw for your Brown plugs now if you've not already seen some of my test Tuesday videos we've already proven that the red plug can handle colossal weights in concrete way way more than you're ever likely to need and that's why generally speaking Brown plugs in my view are a little bit pointless but if for some reason you need to use a six millimeter screw as opposed to a five millimeter screw a six mil screw would probably rip the red plugs to shreds a little bit too much so if for some reason you're doing a project where you've got to use a six mil screw then go for the brown plug instead so just for the minute I'm going to dismiss a yellow plugs and the brown plugs and just have a little chat about the red plugs because this is the one that you're going to be using almost all the time screw wise I like to go for either a 10 gauge screw if you're working off imperial measurement or a 5 millimeter screw if you're working off metric but we'll come back to some of these longer screws and what you can do with them now these are just bog standard wood screws these are silver screws with a single thread and these are Quicksilver screws with a twin thread now I've found negligible difference between these in terms of the holding power into a red plug all I would say and I've mentioned this before is avoid screws that have a very aggressive thread on them for example these are turbo gold screws and you can see they've got the self drilling ultra sharp tip on them and they've got the rifled shank and all sorts of other little things that are designed for helping the screw to cut its way in the wood but it doesn't really help matters when you're going the plastic wall plugs and it tends to damage the plug if you've got no other option the will work but you'll probably get better holding power from bog-standard single or twin thread wood screws obviously the other key difference here between the silver screw and the Quicksilver is that on the silver screw we've got the thread going all the way up to the head the countersunk head of the screw and on the Quicksilver the thread stops about ten mil shy of the head of the screw and that's really useful if you're a touching say for example timber buttoning or something like that if you're attaching stuff onto the wall and you don't want that bit of whatever you're attaching to be disturbed by the thread of the screw then this kind of thread patterns probably going to be a better option for you so first of all let's cover the absolute basics of using a 40 mil screw in a red plug all you're going to do normally a combi drill will be fine for something like this but it depends how solid your concrete wall is or your concrete blocks hammer action on and I'm gonna go in the depth of the screw plus a little bit I want it so that the tip of the screw has no chance of bottoming out in the hall [Music] here's a really common thing that can happen did you see how the bit moved while I'm drilling into the into the piece that can happen very easily if you hit like a dense little stone in the concrete or whatever so all I'm gonna do I'm gonna drill in at a slight angle and then I'm gonna bring the drill back up to vertical again and then that should get me back on path hopefully you'll know once you get the plug in whether or not you're still getting a decent fixing but hopefully that at least gets your haul back in the correct position you can put a mark on the drill bit if you want but just check where you screw that it's not hitting the bottom of the hole which it's not absolutely fine they're just going to give the pole a quick blow if that was on a wall the dust would have fallen down by gravity in do my paint and dust catcher which I've already made a video all about pop the plug in doesn't matter if it goes slightly below the surface we'll chat a little bit about what happens when you're on a wall with really thick plaster obviously you would be attaching something onto the wall but I'm just showing you it their impact drivers generally really good for this sort of job and that's it absolutely solid fixing that will never in a million years come out as I say we've already done tests on this channel showing the crazy sort of weights that you can get off a single screw into a red plug in concrete now what happens if you've really made a mess of this haul so let me just try and get this plug out so let's say that okay you've ended up moving the drill all over the shop to try and get it straight and you've made the hole too big so now the red plugs just generally flopping about a little bit in the hole a little tip for you here and you can take your yellow plug tap it into the red plug get it in as far as it will go comfortably get some snips trim it off and then we're back to getting a really strong fitting again even though the holes a little bit oversized by the way this is a bit of a one-shot thing because as soon as you take the screw out because you've chopped the end of yellow plug off there's nothing really holding these are but you can see where the thread has quite happily bitten into the yellow plug and then forced the red plug to have a nice secure fitting in halt and of course if you really muck it up and you're still struggling to get a good fixing with a red plug then upgrade to a brown plug switch over to an 8 mil bit drill it out for the 8 mil obviously just make sure that you've drilled a hole deep enough for your brown plug because these are a little bit bigger again slightly below the surface you can use the same screw it'll be fine you can go for a 6 mil if you want but you can use a 5 mil screw with Brown it'll be fine but as we've proven in previous tests a red plug with a 5 mil screw will give a stronger fixing than a brown plug with a 5 mil screws so just bear that in mind and the source if you're still having problems getting a good fixing into your Brown plug then you can do the same again let's say you've completely mucked up your 8 mil hole and you've made it far too big same thing Brown plug pop a red plug into the brown plug tap it home [Music] we're back to getting crazily secure fixing now obviously generally speaking you're going to want to drill a fresh hole rather than going for these kind of remedial fixes but you do run into situations where that's just not an option if you've got a bracket that you're putting on the wall and that is literally the only place you can put the hole and you've mucked a hole up or what is much more common that you're going to run into you know if you've got a perfect concrete block like this everything's generally going to be fine problems start to occur when you hit the edge of a block and you go into a mortar line and especially in older houses that more align can some aimes be like just going into dust it can be good like going into just sand but if you still feel that you're not getting a good fixing by putting one plug inside another and of course you can also do a yellow plug inside a brown plug as well which can work pretty well if you're still not confident that you're getting a good fixing then just go deeper into whatever you're drilling into so this is where having a selection of longer screws can really help the situation a few different scenarios here first of all you might have done your haul and you're just not confident that you're getting a good fixing with a 40 mil screw I'm gonna switch to Imperial here because I've got a few different screw sizes so let's say you didn't get a very good fixing we're two and a half inch screw well one thing you can do is just go deeper into whatever you're drilling into the first thing I'm going to do is try a two and a half inch screw instead of the one and three-quarter inch so basically this screw so it's a straight way that's going to bottom out in the hall that's no use [Music] that's comfortably reaching the bottom of the hole and in that sort of situation just run two reds back to back now just double-check that if you do run to back the back are they likely to bottom out it doesn't matter if I do so you can always trim the top off but take your first red plug pop it in get a long screw any long screw hammer it all the way down to the bottom of the hole just gently and then get your second plug and now we've got a two and a half inch screw and likewise this hole here that were had the 8 mil plug in let's go for a 3 inch screw into that instead I'm just going to drill the hole a bit deeper with the 8 mil masonry bit as I say just make sure the tip of the screw isn't hitting the bottom of the hole well done Andrew again let's see if we can get to brown plugs back to back not quite so what I'm going to do in this situation I don't want to trim off the top of the plug in this situation is possible because that's what's holding the plug together so what I'd rather do is just trim a bit off the first plug that's going to go in hammer that home set and plug in that ain't gone anyway so just to quickly summarize where we are so far red plug should be absolutely fine in the vast majority of situations if you want to use a bigger screw just run them back-to-back you can go out and buy longer plugs if you want and there's all sorts of other options but you know there's only so much stuff that you can carry around on a job generally speaking running your plugs back to back will be fine if you've made the hole too big consider going for a brown plug or run your brown plugs back to back as well if you want to go for a bigger screw if you're still not confident that you're getting a good fixing using all of these kind of methods that I've talked about here let me just put a pound coin on here so you can get an idea of the scale of what we're talking about but you could go for things like your big frame fixings I mean these have a specific purpose that I'll talk about on a on a separate video but again if you happen to have the in your toolkit Dayton be handy to get you out of a number of different situations we've already talked about the fish do all power plugs these are fantastic the only thing is you might struggle running them back to back because if you can see there's a little lip on the back end of the plug next on the list is maybe to go for a bigger fish add your power this is a dual power 10 by 50 plug these particular ones great for TV brackets and stuff like that 10 mil hole for the plug itself and to come with 7 by 70 court screws you could also look into using something like the Fisher u X plugs again that's the U X 10 so 10 mil hole on these particular ones they're a great problem solver to have in your kit bag and have a look into just using concrete screws no plug whatsoever these have like a self cutting thread on them you can see the serrations on the red part the thread there and finally my last port of call would be to bring in the wall bolt if you're still struggling with all of these to get a good fixing get a wall bolt or shield anchor under the job and I have yet to run into a situation where one of these doesn't fix a problem that I'm trying to have with attaching something crazily heavy onto a wall remember on most walls and we're not talking about dot and dab here on most walls you're gonna have plaster over the top of you either block work or brick or whatever and you need to get past that plaster the plaster gives you now on no holding power whatsoever so you need to get into the solid block work if you do hit a more align you're gonna have to be a little bit more creative on the fixing that you're using it really depends on what you're trying to hang on the wall wall bolts can actually work pretty well in a more aligned because it's wide enough that it's going to bridge that gap between the two layers of brick or the two layers of block so these can get you out of a lot of tricky situations but obviously you're then a little bit more limited in the sort of fitting that you can actually use with a wall board because of thickness of the actual bolt itself but generally speaking your humble red plug is going to be fine for the vast majority of situations as I say I'm generally using the dual power plug these days but I still carry these around carry red plugs Brown plugs and even the little yellow plugs because you never know when you might have to do a little bit of remedial work just to get the fitting working the way that you want it I'll be going into these slightly more exotic fittings in future videos so don't forget to hit subscribe if you're new to the channel we're going to be talking about Thermolite blocks and dot dab in a separate video because there are a whole different animal remember always check the manufacturers data sheets for the maximum loadings that you can use with a particular fixing I'll try and pop links in the description below to all of the fixings that we've talked about today I hope you found that useful I shall see you next time daddy bye [Music]

Channel: Gosforth Handyman

Views: 96,756

Rating: 4.8779173 out of 5

Keywords: wall anchor, how to, wall plugs, wall fixings, wall plug tips, wall anchor tips, fixing things to walls, attach things to wall without nails, attach things to brick, solid walls, red plugs, yellow plugs, brown plugs, fischer fixings, fischer, ghtl, ghtl#32, diy tips, construction tips and tricks, construction tips, construction tips for beginners, handyman tips, wall plug, how to use wall plugs, wall anchors, wall anchors for concrete

Id: TQ13gug7aQ4

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019