fixings advice

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Attached should be two pictures. a) the wall. It is brick underneath covered by a thick quite crumbly layer of mortar (sandy stuff anyway) and then very thin plaster on top. The problem is that in various parts of the house this is quite solid enough to let normal wall plug hold, in others it taps hollow as if it's come away from the wall underneath. A normal brown wall plug doesn't have the depth in certain areas of the house to get to the brick underneath.


b) is the best fixing I have found for the thicker areas except I've run out and I need a replacement or ideas, possibly even resin in the hole and then putting a wall plug in ? I did try this with non solvenated grip fill (I think that grip fill was a suggestion somewhere here, but it never cured deep in the hole even after 3 days. I do have a tude of solvenated grip fill knocking around.


The bugger is that I can't get a hold of these fixings any more I got a large bag including screws for £1 at a cheap pound store. The hole above is caused by the brown (normal wall plug) ripping out. These universal fixings cost about 40p each and the ones I used were 50mm long.
 
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Problem is caused by not fixing deep enough, ignore weak area and drive plug beyond to brick and fix with longer screw.
 
Okay so how do I get the lip of the rawl plug past the 20mm of mortar ? without breaking it, no tool I have spring to mind to hammer it through.
 
You can use a long screw inverted and hammer or use rimless wall plugs. ;)
 
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If you are struggling with standard plugs, why not try small hammer screw fixings like the ones seen HERE

They are a bit more heavy duty, but can still be used like a regular plug and screw, and will do the job nicely in most circumstances. :)
 
Right I tried the original poster's suggestion as it seemed sensible to anchor into the brick. I got round the lip problem by using a slightly bigger drill bit.

The downsides, sometimes it didn't hit a brick, the drill went through the mortar between, anchoring is not good here and there's not much chance of predicting.

Hammer fixing's I do have some battens to put up and am going to try those again, the last time was with a twin rail shelving system where the depth of rail was inadequate for the first lot I bought and then with the correct ones the hole in the twin rail allowed wobble, unlike a batten so the "nails" sometime bent and getting them to hold fast meant that the rails were smacking into the fragile plaster/ crumbly mortar mix.

I think for some of the holes I will be forced to use a resin or wet n fix, bu this time before I load the shelves there's going to be lots of testing as four twin rail upright collapsing with 26 brackets and woodwork on me this morning did not make my day.
 
So does wickes, which is where I got the picture, but the price for what they are is ridiculous. I'm also considering the fischer universal plug from screwfix which is much more reasonable but doesn't include screws.

The good thing about rawl wallplugs is that they have the gauge/ mm screw size and drill bit size on the strip, I find these little touches nice.

Here's a thing though, have a look at the screwfix catalogue, about 20 differing kinds of wood screw, a load of specialist screws, self tapping screws though ? assuming that's the correct type for the wall plugs in general, two types, none wide enough for a brown plug.
 
Right I tried the original poster's suggestion as it seemed sensible to anchor into the brick. I got round the lip problem by using a slightly bigger drill bit.

The downsides, sometimes it didn't hit a brick, the drill went through the mortar between, anchoring is not good here and there's not much chance of predicting.

Hammer fixing's I do have some battens to put up and am going to try those again, the last time was with a twin rail shelving system where the depth of rail was inadequate for the first lot I bought and then with the correct ones the hole in the twin rail allowed wobble, unlike a batten so the "nails" sometime bent and getting them to hold fast meant that the rails were smacking into the fragile plaster/ crumbly mortar mix.

I think for some of the holes I will be forced to use a resin or wet n fix, bu this time before I load the shelves there's going to be lots of testing as four twin rail upright collapsing with 26 brackets and woodwork on me this morning did not make my day.
That was a mistake you should use smaller drill bit in loose material a larger bit make the hole too large and offers little grip to plug, as you discovered.
 
Okay I probably didn't explain something. First I started with red Uno plugs tapped into a 6mm hole these were in the crumbling mortar under the layer of plaster and that was what collapsed. Now I drilled the hole out to the brick underneath using an 8mm bit and a 9mm bit to take the layer of mortar away so that I could get the brown bigger plug into the brick. When using the impact driver on this second attempt it did at least impact, inferring that on some occassions a solid grip had been achieved. Are you saying that I should have stuck with the red 6mm plugs and driven them in further ? because then the screws supplied would not have had enough depth unless I went and used the screws for the brown ones.
 
Yes should have stayed with 6mm plug and used a longer screw, supplied screws are rarely up to the job or even suitable for the job.
 

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