All, I am currently decorating my new flat and would like to mount things (shelves etc) on the plasterboard. I have bought some plasterboard plugs from screwfix (quote 58219) but these dont appear to have a long enough 'neck' to reach through to the other side before they split out into the arrow head. The walls appear to be about and inch thick.
During the 'cleanup', I have taken out some screws that were mounted using standard brown rawl plugs - would these be a strong enough fixing for things like book shelves or should I try and hunt out plasterboard plugs with longer 'necks' ??
fix through the plasterboard just by turning them with a screw driver.
Or is it that you want to fix something directly on to the brick wall behind the plasterboard ?
If you want to hang anything heavy, or that is going to take heavy or fragile items, then you'd need to find the studs, the upright timbers, behind the plasterboard to get a secure enough fixing.
Plasterboard is to light to take any kind of weight like book shelves. The fixings above will eventually pull out of the wall if they are taking any real load.
You can't mount shelves directly to plasterboard. You either need to connect to the brick wall behind, if there is one, or the vertical wooden beams, called studs. Also, you might not have plasterboard, if it is as thick as you say. It might be a lath and plaster wall. Is it an old flat?
When I was fitting the kitchen wall units I knew they were going to be taking some weight so I made sure at least 2 of the 4 were screwed directly to the wall beams; the rest of the mountings were the ones BigWallop mentions in his post, and I also screwed the cabinets together.
I don't think plasterboard itself would be strong enough for a bookshelf, particularly if its only been nailed up instead of using drywall screws which is what I use, but then again I'm paranoid and always overdo things 'just to make sure' :)
The brown rawlplugs should only be used for pictures or light fittings etc.
I've never got on well with that type of fixing. For relatively light duty things - small shelves, CD racks, & the like - I've found the metal screw-in drivers (s-fix 11923) to be easy to position exactly and quick to use. I tend to drill a small (5mm dia) pilot first, more to see if there's a stud behind (if so, happy happy joy for strength, use a woodscrew direct into the wood instead) than to make the ReadiDriva go in more easily, though that's a handy side-effect. They also come out again easily leaving a reasonable hole for Polyfilling; though they'll often crack the skim coat just around the fixing as you apply that final tighten...
For heavier loads - yes, shelves full of paperbacks - I've been happy with the "hollow wall anchor" they sell - 18266, 12229, and 11143, depending on thickness of plasterboard and thickness of fitting. Just sometimes the should-be-captive nut at the back on these decides not to be captive, leaving you spinning the mounting screw uselessly instead of bending the legs of the fitting up against the back of the board; I've taken to doing a half-turn or so with the fitting not yet inserted to check for this. On a few occaisions it's still gone wrong, and I've had to partially unscrew then snap off the head of the fitting (it comes off easily, presumably deliberately) and pushed the half-bent body of the fitting back into the unknown depths of the cavity ;-) These fittings are quite nice at redecoration time, as the bolts screw out allowing you to take the shelf/cupboard/whatever off the wall, and then replace it with the same bolts into the same anchor - unlike gravity toggles, which fall into the cavity if you ever take the screw out.
For *really* heavy stuff - TV wall mounting bracket, say, or the long run of Spur uprights holding 4 room-length and 2 most-of-room-length shelves in the study-at-home where I'm sitting right now, which are full of papers & hardback books, I took the trouble to find the studs at their 60cm intervals and screwed straight in with bigass woodscrews almost-but-not-quite into the plasterboard forming the wall of the room next door ;-) I'm also lucky with the construction of this house, which though 'modern' timber-frame and PB-n-stud walls is a good Swedish-kit instance of same, where the builders seem to have used PB which is 12.5 or 15mm thick rather than the 9.5mm which is more common; so what works well in this thickness of PB may be a little dodgier in thinner
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