I am currently considering whether to renovate our kitchen or to shell out the 10k+ that it will cost to get it done (room is 3.6m x 5m). One issue which I am not clear on is whether the SDS type chasey chisel things will work on exterior brick. Similar question is also posed for the use of socket box cutters IYSWIM. Our kitchen is a single storey extension and therefore has one long wall that is an exterior part of the original 1970s construction. I don't have an SDS drill so it would mean laying out money for tools to do this one job (the rest of the house is nearly sorted).
Angle grinder. No seriously. Cut slots with an angle grinder and chase out with an SDS chisel. Note though that this makes *one almighty hell* of a lot of dust.
IME, Socket box cutters work OK on soft blocks and reasonably well on breeze blocks. For bricks and dense concrete blocks, they are not so good to useless, depending on which type you get. YMMV.
If you're doing a whole kitchen, I would invest in a wall chaser, which is basically an angle grinder which takes a pair of diamond cutting disks, with disk spacing and cutting depth controls, and a vacuum cleaner take-off (for which you'll need a Dyson, if you really want to capture the dust).
The SDS will be useful too, but I wouldn't want to channel though much brickwork with it alone. As for socket box cutters, I found the circular cutter to be quite useful for sinking the holes, but the squaring off tool was completely useless in brick -- a plain SDS chisel bit works much better. The cutter sunk about 25 holes for me in brick commons, before very suddenly stopping working when it went blunt. In the kit I bought (many years ago with the squaring off tool), that works out at £3 per sunk hole (£6 for double sockets). I think you can buy the circular cutter alone for less. It does generate lots of dust.
My view as well. The SDS chisel will still produce dust but comparatively coarse and no where near as much in quantity and without flinging it quite so forceably into the atmosphere.
The angle grinder or chase cutter turns the entire volume of the slots it makes into fine dust. A Chisel cuts its way through by spliting lumps off.
Worth a poke through the archives as wall chasing options have been discussed quite a lot before.
If you want to go down the wall chaser route, certain branches of Aldi are selling them off =A320 and someone (can't remember who) said the dust extraction was quite efficient when connected to a workshop vac.
If you haven't got an SDS, how about this offer at Wickes:
They do. I have chased runs in hard brick with a 2kg class SDS.
Not usually - these work best in soft blocks
Given the difference in price between having it done and DIYing you could probably spend a couple of k on tools and still come out a winner! (feel free to use that line to sell SWMBO on the idea!)
For any quantity of chasing, get a two disc wall chaser:
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will make most of the slots very straight forward - the dust collection controls the dust, and the SDS can break out the remaining fillet of masonry very quickly and easily.
For socket back boxes in hard brick etc, I have found that a pair of chisels for the SDS work as well as anything.
The way I use them is to offer the box to the wall, and draw round it.
Stick a 20mm chisel bit in the SDS and mark the box depth on it. Then run round the perimeter line sinking the chisel to the depth mark.
Swap to a 40mm chisel, start about a third of the way in from the left and chisel in and toward the left until you have the left hand end sunk to the right depth. Repeat for the other end, and then you can take out the centre bit and level up the back. If your SDS has a decent speed controller then it is easy enough to plane down the back of the cut out.
With practice you can do a box in under five mins.
I've had good reults using masonry drills around the edge, then a cold chisel to remove the worst afterwards
the other possibility for a kitchen, especially it its relatively crap walls.and you will be tiling, is to make a false wall out of MDF and run cables behind it. This can be out in after cupboards etc go in, between worktop and cupboards. Wiring is then done using back boxes surface screwed to existing walls mated with cutouts in the MDF.
I can't fathom out why anyone would use a tool like this. I've worked with dozens of electricians in all kinds of properties for over
20 years and I've never seen a wall chaser being used by any of them, they simply cut through the mortar, which lets face it is usually sand and lime and therefore dust with skimming holing it back - it can be either sliced through with a stanley knife and raked out with a cold chisel, or if it's bonding / browning / render, then it's just a matter of running a bolster down it and clip the cables to the brick underneath.
How do you do a vertical chase like that then? (can't think of many brick patterns that have vertical mortar runs)...
Having said that - I am surprised you have not seen chasers in action.
My last place had fearsomely hard plaster and bricks. If you wanted some oval trunking in a chase then you needed to go about a 1/4" into the bricks as well. A bolster a club hammer was painfully slow and hard work
- about 20 mins to half an hour for a full drop chase. With a SDS and chisel bit that would come down to 5 to 10 mins, and with a chaser, and using a slim bolster to pop out the fillet, you could do the same chase in under 2 mins.
And on t'other hand what about fearsomely loose plaster? Do professional sparks also use a bolster and club hammer on old Victorian plaster and leave the customer to pay for the repair of the very, very large chunks of plaster which then detach from the walls? (I know I ought redo the whole thing but I'm not one of those pact-with-the-devil people who can get large areas flat.)
I've not invested in a wall chaser (yet) but have used an angle grinder on some hard bits. And have sacrificed the odd old tenon saw on softer bits: well it worked for me at the time......
Stanley knife, score down through the plaster to the wall each side of the channel. Then the plaster can be scraped out of the channel with an old screwdriver or chisel.
That's correct, trunking isn't required. And as far as using one on old plaster, I can imagine an entire wall falling off if one of these was used on it
Yes, thanks, that's my starting point. But in some places the plaster's too thin so I need to get into the bricks. (This is mainly on internal walls where I suspect the apprentice did some practice.) Then there are other places where it's been patched with what looks seems to be some kind of concrete (which is where I've resorted to the angle grinder).
i.e. not all plaster is created equal. Nice modern gypsum stuff is usually fairly easy to chase, and some Victorian lime plaster is also easy to work. However some (especially 50's places IME) seem to be plastered in something closer to a cement render. Often the skim coat is weak and has a habit of blowing, but the base coat is as hard as brick. Same obviously applies to places that have been treated for damp or tanked and literally are rendered inside.
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