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Yeah, the one I use is great.
A nail.
I have not found a stud finder that works consistently for plaster.
I gave up on the electronic ones, and use one (for drywall only) that uses the old magnet style.
The magnet is only strong enough to find the nail/screw heads in the drywall mud covering them. Will NOT detect plumbing, will NOT detect HVAC, metal studs etc.
Magic Stud Finder Plus, I think it's called. Goofy name, I know. But it works.
Again, won't work for plaster, but since we're talking about them...this has yet to fail me (though I thought it would...I'm known for throwing the latest & greatest stud finders against the closest concrete wall after it has failed) for drywall.
As the above poster said, start drillin' and fillin', unless you can guess it right.
I tend to agree with the others -- plaster walls make the task difficult for electronics.
Which I why I'm always sure to have a 1/16" drill bit in my kit. If the room has chair rail. drill holes right at the bottom edge -- no one will ever see them.
If no chair rail, drill at the top edge of the baseboard -- assuming the base is white-painted, a quick run with some caulk covers the holes.
And of course, once you drill enough holes to find one stud, you can at least try every 16" from there. With a bit of luck, you'll have found them all.
Think plaster is tough try finding studs in a bathroom behind tiles when the backing was mesh and mud!
Brian
using my Zircon stud-finder.
If you're not a Zirconian female, you shouldn't expect that thing to find you a stud, honey.
EGGS-alent!
:)
Assuming an uninsulated wall - Take a coathanger and bend it into a flat-ish U-shape with the legs around 9"-10" long (exactly the same length) and the bottom of the U about 2"-3" wide. Drill a hole through the plaster large enough to feed one leg into the cavity. The goal is to end up with the flat bottom of the U going through the plaster with parallel ends of the wire on each side of the plaster. Turn until the inside leg touches a stud - the outside (parallel) leg that you can see shows you where one edge of the stud is. Turn the other way to 'touch' the next stud face. Sorry, you'll have a few small holes to patch.
Jeff
Edited 8/15/2009 10:43 pm ET by Jeff_Clarke
Cute trick, I will file that one.
They can't get your Goat if you don't tell them where it is hidden.
Which Zircon do you have? They make 3-4 of them. The $20 one does not work near as well as the $100 one.
I had a bosch that worked well. it was made for finding rebar in crete so must've been more powerful.
but it got flakey on me.
Try a thread search using advanced search on this topic. Somebody mentioned another one that is similar to what I had that is currently on the market.
Do you have metal lathe in the plaster or wood lathe?
another tip I have read here was to use a simple rare earth magnet and roll it acrtoss the wall untill it jumps out of your hand.
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Try the Stud4Sure at Duluth trading. Awesome product. Use it all the time.
Constructing in metric...
every inch of the way.