OK I know this is a bit of a simple question (but then thats me all over!)
I tried to put up a guitar hanger that required drilling into a plastered wall. The plaster is at least 30 years old. When I drilled into it it all crumbled away and I didnt get a very good hole at all.
I used a standard cordless drill - should I have used a hammer action drill?
The resulting hole is unusable, any suggestions as to what I can do.
On the surface the plaster didnt look bad (before I drilled).
I really should learn to read the whole post befor replying ;-))
The guitars (as there are a total of 4 of them - I was going to put up 4 seperate hangers) are worth a couple of grand in total so I wouldnt want them falling off at any time :-)
I think it might be worth considering whether the Polyfilla will hold in a hole in such crumbly plaster. I agree that Polyfilla will fill the hole up and tidy things up but maybe you should drill right through it into the brickwork (using hammer action) in order to get a good hold on something solid.
My point is not regarding the strength of the filler, but how strongly the filler bonds to the plaster. I visualise that when the OP puts a fixture into the filler that the whole lump of filler will pull away intact.
If you hit a brick, you'll need hammer action. However, if you go into a (lime) mortar joint, you don't want hammer action. The bricks used on internal plastered walls were usually the B grade bricks. Sometimes when one of these sees a hammer drill (particularly SDS), it shatters into hundreds of pieces. To repair that, I generally brush out loose material, paint the edges with diluted PVA so it soaks in and binds what's left together, and then fill with bonding coat plaster. If this is for a flush electrical accessory, you can simply push the back box into the plaster and it will be fixed better than any screw would have done. If it's to repair a large missing area, then you ideally want to level off the bonding coat a couple of mm below the wall surface and finish it with finish coat plaster (whilst bonding coat is still wet) or polyfilla (once the bonding coat is dry).
Someone else's suggestion of car body filler sounds OK, but I would still stablise the surface with a wash of dilute PVA first. In the case of body filler, let PVA dry in case the moisture prevents the body filler bonding. (In the case of plaster, it sticks better if the PVA is still tacky.)
With an old house, the internal wall may only be lath & plaster, in which case you need to locate the vertical studding and screw into this. Since the studding may not be in the position you want, the solution is to put a horizontal battern across 2 or more. Since you want to hang several guitars this would seem to be the answer
Just fill it in and drill a new hoile 2" away diagonally (if feasable) - the original hole went into a crumly mortar course, the new hole will be in brick or similar.
Thinking about it 1.5 vertically doesn't help either. Top of 1 vertical to bottom of the next... I think the best answer is to try one diagonal, and if it doesn't work the opposite one.
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