Wooden Rawlplugs

[Murmansk]

Anyone tried these? They're three times the price of the red plastic ones!

[nightjar]

That looks like a high priced version of the piece of scrap wood I used to carve into a rough cylinder, before hammering it into the hole.

[newshound]

Eco-bollox. Spend your money on Fischer for important stuff.

[DJC]

Are they going back to the original, pre-plastic type of ~~60 years ago? A sort of brown woody fibre?

[Fredxx]

Not that long ago, even I can remember them!

[John Rumm]

Made from fibre, & animal blood IIRC - I bet the vegans love em :-)

[Fredxx]

I never knew they might have contained animal blood.

Even Rawplug themselves aren't entirely sure:

"a small fibre plug made of jute bonded with glue or animal blood"

And the UK website:

"made of jute fibres soaked in a mixture of animal blood and glue".

[misterroy]

All the internal walls in my house are block behind the plasterboard. I cut off a piece of dowel and hammer it in. I have tried other solutions, but only the other more expensive expanding type fixings take a proper hold. These would work for me and be cheaper in terms of time, if they were 30mm longer.

[Clive Arthur]

I had those, but also some stuff from Rawlplug, I think, which IIRC was asbestos fibre in some sort of binder which you stuffed in a hole before screwing. I may be confused.

[charles]

'Rawlplastic' I might even still have some, Very useful in ragged shaped holes.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Abandoned because they were pretty awful. But then it is a requirement of anything eco that it not work very well if at all.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Rawlplastic. Marvellous stuff.

Then came the plastic plugs which were not as good

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

I never liked those, despiet using many thousands of them. They had limited accomodation for the hole diameter in the wall, it had to be drilled fairly accurately, then if you got it too precise, the screw might bind, sometimes break. Too large, and you would end up making a wood plug. They were also sometimes difficult to fit in the depth of the hole where you wanted it, where it was deep in the plaster.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The great thing about rawlplastic was that it fitted arbitrarily ragged holes well: the modern equivalent is car body filler.

[charles]

They did different jobs. there's now an epoxy version of Rawlplastic

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

The ones I remember used to be made of a kind of fibre and pretty parallel ,not tapered like the plastic ones. Very good they were, but needed careful hole drilling. Brian

[charles]

almost certainly by hand.

[NY]

I'm not sure I'd want a hammer-action hand-drill ;-) Unless you are going back to the time of navvies drilling holes for explosives when making tunnels - hammer-rotate-hammer-rotate at a rate of a few cycles per minute.

Why do you need careful drilling for wooden/fibre plugs, but not for plastic Rawlplugs? Either way, you make the hole a bit bigger than the screw that you want to use, to accommodate the plug, and rely on the plug being expanded by the screw so the plug grips the outside of the hole all the way along. I remember my dad using a four matchsticks as a quick-and-dirty substitute when he ran out of Rawlplugs.

[Bob Eager]

In those days you probably used a Rawltool.

[charles]

We did that my hand - a Rawltool was the implement. Hammer , rotate, etc,