Stud Finder Can Find Just the Right Spot to Drive That Nail
Stud Finder is one of the foremost recognizable brands when it involves power tools and accessories. They make almost everything under the sun, making it possible for craftsmen to possess a whole workbench filled.
The Best Stud Finders, which are the key to remodeling jobs and will come in quite handy for even the smallest jobs. Using it is as simple as managing a few buttons and watching for the red light to indicate that you are near a stud. It is an easy yet effective tool that will combat an enormous array of tasks around the home or construction site
Find Just the Right Spot to Drive That Nail
The next time you would like to hold an image on your wall or install some shelves, you would possibly believe aesthetics alone to decide on the location. Of course, if you do that, you risk being awakened in the middle of the night by a loud crashing sound as your object falls from the wall under its weight.
That is because, as every contractor and do-it-yourselfer knows, you can't rely on wallboard or plaster alone to support something heavy. For real support, you need to fix it directly to a stud inside the wall. Contractors have tricks for finding the studs. Most involve rapping against the wall and listening for a change in the tone of the knock, then banging in a thin nail to verify the stud's location. Another old trick involves turning on an electric razor and dragging the butt across a wall, noting the change in tone as you progress from a wall cavity to a stud.
But in the 1970s, technology began to creep into the business of stud-finding. Devices appeared that eliminated the necessity of permanently hearing -- and for an enormous tub of spackle to patch the wall when, inevitably, you ended up missing the stud anyway. The earliest stud finders detected ferrous metals using compass-like pivoting magnets. Even though only commercial buildings use metal studs, magnetic stud finders, which are still available, work with wooden studs, too, by locating the metal nails used to mount the wallboard or wooden lath.
A newer type of stud finder works by detecting density changes in a wall. These capacitive finders can typically detect changes in wall density to a thickness of about three-quarters of an in. . Advanced models, like the StudSensor, manufactured by the Zircon Corporation of Campbell, Calif., have a setting that increases the sensitivity to a little more than an inch. This works fine, a minimum of in theory, for wallboard-covered walls, because the wallboard is thinner than the stud finder's depth range. But older plaster walls are often thicker and the thickness varies considerably, which can result in some false positive readings for the presence of studs.
A more serious drawback to the technology is that studs are not the only things in walls that register a different density. Pipes are much denser than plaster and lath (and studs), and wiring and conduit can also trigger a positive reading. Because it is especially ill-advised to knock nails into pipes and wires, some low-tech common sense must come into play when operating a stud finder. Any smart do-it-yourselfer or contractor has a mental checklist of items that confirm that reading is a stud.
The first rule of operation is to use the permanent magnet as its reference book recommends, which involves marking the sides of any stud reading with a pencil. As you continue across the length of the wall, you mark any stud readings as you go. You should be able to see a pattern of readings emerge -- studs are usually 16 inches apart, and that is the pattern you should see. Any reading that seems to have a different width or an irregular placement is most likely not a stud at all, but some anomaly that should not have screws or nails driven into it.
On the horizon, there's a 3rd technology being adapted to the matter of hidden studs: micropower impulse radar. This low-cost radar technology was developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1990s. The laboratory and the electronics engineer who invented the technology, Thomas McEwan, obtained a patent on a radar stud detector in 1995, and the lab has since licensed the technology to many companies, some of which expect to plug radar stud finders soon.
Micropower impulse radar features a considerably greater range than capacitive technology -- between several inches and some other feet deep. But finding studs isn't the sole planned use of the technology. It may also be used, among other things, for locating steel reinforcement in concrete pilings, as part of an in-vehicle device to warn drivers about vehicles in their blind spot and to help find people inside collapsed buildings. That is all a far cry from banging picture hooks into walls, but it all boils down to the same technical problem of finding something in a space you can't see.