Drilling a hole through a house wall

[The Medway Handyman]

> also be careful which way you drill as if you drill from inside

Worked with the Channel Tunnel...

[jgharston]

You shouldn't use cement, you should use mortar.

JGH

[Peter Parry]

Do you have any idea how much money they had to spend on surveyors to achieve that? It would be cheaper to demolish the house and rebuild it around the hole :-).

[ARWadsworth]

Back in the 70's my Dad calculated the direction of the tunnels that were dug to link Dodworth and Redbrook collieries that were 4 miles apart. His calculations were only 4 foot out when the tunnels met.

[george [dicegeorge]]

yes, from my tub of readymix, ive always said bricks are joined with cement and its hard to remember to call it mortar

[g]

ps and add water to the readymix!

[The Medway Handyman]

Its very unlucky if you do that in a paying customers house :-)

Such detectors are as much use as a back pocket in a sock.

I would never, ever put a screw or nail in a floorboard without lifting one to check where the wires & pipes are. Never, ever.

[The Medway Handyman]

:-)

[jgharston]

It seems to be a particular American affliction to call concrete and mortar "cement". If you tried building a house on a cement slab, or building a bridge out of cement, it would be both hugely expensive and would snap and crumble as soon as any weight was put on it.

(I did once accidently plaster a wall with a bucket of cement. I did wonder why it was going on strangely. My own fault for not looking at the bag before I poured it into the mixing bucket.)

JGH

[John Williamson]

Even the Channel Tunnel was 3 inches off centre. They blame the fact that they were using the first generation Pentium 60 CPUs, with the error in the lookup table.

[Invisible Man]

snip

Agreed.

The pipes were in a stupid position and got complacent around my own house. Did find a pair of still live pipes running to a dry corner of a bedroom. Evidently been a wash hand basin there at some stage.

[Tinkerer]

I have a couple of very long drills that I picked up in a pound type shop. Used one recently to put a satellite cable through the wall. It went through fine with my old B&D hammer drill although the drill bit won't be much good for anything else. Two tips if I may. First, to avoid pushing a chunk of wall out as it bursts through, get someone to press a block of wood against the wall where the drill is due to appear. Second make the hole slope so that the external end is slightly lower than the internal, that should help against water ingress.

[Tinkerer]

I always wondered why you feel a slight bump in the middle. ;o)

[Steve Walker]

As a child I remember getting up one morning at around 3 o'clock for a family day trip to London and finding the kitchen floor wet through and the light fitting fizzing. Someone had nailed a floorboard down years before and the nail must have been just touching a water pipe. The board later started to move and over the years, the nail wore its way through the pipe - why it chose that night to actually fail, no-one knows!

SteveW

[ARWadsworth]

Never under-estimate a nail. They have intelligence.

How else would they know to make sure that a puncture is not only in the best tyre on your car but also in a spot that cannot legally be repaired?

[Tinkerer]

I had a Ford Popular (the old sit up and beg model) in my youth. It suddenly developed a fault where as soon as you exceeded 30 mph a knocking srarted at the back. Eventually traced it by spotting a shiny patch on the exhaust pipe. A nail had somehow entered the side of the tread at an angle and, above 30mph, the centrifugal force swung it out far enough to start hitting the exhaust on each revolution. No puncture, just pulled it out and problem solved. You are right, they have intelligence to the extent of being crafty.

[Tabby]

ole through a 34cm brick wall,

plastric channel & foam fill are completely unnecessary to stop rain entering.

NT

[Steve Walker]

Ah, that one I can answer! All tyre damage is non-repairable, unless there is lifetime cover in force that will replace an unrepairable tyre, at which point all damage magically becomes repairable.

SteveW

[The Other Mike]

Because its not just any nail, its a specially selected KwikFit* nail

• substitute just about any tyre fitting place.

A few years ago, but possibly not in the UK, you used to be able to get DIY tyre repair kits, a wooly bit of coarse thread and a gloopy compound that you stuffed into the puncture hole with a needle.

No need to even dismount the tyre - and 'safe' to motorway speeds so they claimed - Michelin did them in Europe so they must have been acceptable at one time.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Other Mike saying something like:

Still available, but using round rubber strip.

[Gib Bogle]

I used that once. Worked fine.