Stud finders - do any work?

[Andy Dee]

Do any of these reliably work? I just bought a Bosch DMF 10 (not cheap either!) with the hope of locating studs beneath my plasterboard/tiled bathroom wall. Bearing in mind that I have some idea where the studs are by measuring, I cannot get the Bosch to give repeatable positions. Sometimes I can get a trusted reading but vertically up or down from this position, it cannot find anything to verify it as a stud. On occasions it latches up bleeping slowly. This is not mentioned in the manual so no idea what it means. Its not the live wire detector as I know where the cables are and it bleeps frantically when it finds one.

Andy.

[Andy Hall]

Are you using it correctly? The usual way is to calibrate over a blank area and then to move the detector horizontally until the studs are found.

I have a Zircon detector (actually two different ones) and they work fine.

[Frank Erskine]

Did you locate any zircon?

:-)

[Andy Hall]

That was a gem....

[Andy Dee]

Yes. tried everything. This one is no good at detecting wood but magic at detecting metal. I was able to find the lines of nails going down each stud and hence find the studs that way.

Andy

[Derek Geldard]

No it wasn't.

DG

[terry]

It was Robin saying "Good gadgets Batman why isn't there any Zircon on this planet?". :-)

[terry]

Another idea. Have had good success with a very strong small magnet. Using those culled out of an old hard drive or somesuch part of a scrapped computer. Able to find the nails/screws holding gyproc (plasterboard) to studs. One can not only 'feel' the presence by sweeping the magnet across the surface but once a nail/screw is found quite often the magnet will stick and stay at the location of the fastener! through the small layer of plaster that has filled the 'dimple' over the fastener. BTW we had two such magnets and they would hold to each other through a sapling some 45 mm (2 inches) thick! If the two came in contact some job to pry them apart! Magnet technology has come along way since before WWII! Also btw one can sometimes feel the vibrations (here it is 60 hertz, yours 50) in electric wires with such a powerful magnet; providing current is 'flowing' through the wires. For example was able to feel the vibration of current flowing to a 3000 watt 230 volt heater by putting magnet close to the flex, even though the flex was twisted and contained a third non current carrying earth/ground wire! Those circular magnets from an old microwave oven magnetron can be useful too! If you don't want your hand tools magnetized keep the magnets out of your tool box!

[robgraham]

I got one out of Lidl/Aldi's about 3 weeks ago that works fine for =A310 and found both the studs and where the nails were without any problem. Can't remember now which shop it was but they were still in stock this week.

Rob

[Frank Erskine]

I've tried various detectors on my tiled bathroom wall, and get numerous spurious 'responses' all over, which leads me to believe that the tiles must have some sort of metallic glaze.

In fact I've just this minute tried a spare tile from a box of spares and it exhibits the same phenomenon. It's a Spanish "Metropol" tile.

[Nick]

Whereabouts and how big are they in the hard drive ? I have an old one and need a good magnet. Will also put out a separate thread. Thanks,

Nick