Wall Anchors Station Guides

This series of six stations is designed to provide students with exposure to basic anchor installation principles and facilitate a boat load of practice installing anchors, hanging items on those anchors, and testing the strength of the placed anchors. The station guides below are designed to outline the core activities to accomplish at each station. Refer to the anchoring basics page for guidelines on installing various types of anchors.

Station List

  1. Nail anchors
  2. Expanding Plug anchors
  3. Positioning and hanging a picture frame
  4. Stud finders, tension types, and comparing anchor strengths
  5. Self-tapping anchors
  6. High-Strength Anchors


Station 1: Nail Anchors

Station Goals:

Layout and install two nail-based hook anchors to hang a lightweight wall decoration level on the wall.

Opening Comments:

A nail-based anchor uses a nail to fasten a hook flat against the wall on which an object is hung. The strength of this anchor setup is derived from the nail's "downward" angle into the wall. The sheer force transfered from the hanger to the nail is responsible for transferring the weight of the object to the gypsum board. These anchors are rated for the smallest wight loads because nails have a relatively small diameter compared to a formal anchor plug. This means less force is needed to cause a substrate failure--meaning the nail is ripped through the gypsum and gravity then pulls the nail out of the wall completely.

Materials Needed:

Guide Bullets

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

Nail-based hook anchors are an important part of any home improvement stock of materials. Many picture frames, calendars, and various artsy stuff is light enough to be a good fit with this type of anchor. Read package specifications for the anchors you buy for a "rated load" and consider this about 25% higher than the maximum continuous load you should plan on hanging. Moisture, time, and bumping can all either weaken the anchor's mount point or stress the anchor beyond it's rating capacity, leading to an anchor failure. This is a Bad Thing.

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Station 2: Expanding Plug anchors

Station Goals:

Position and install a fibre-optic conversion box to your wall using expanding plug anchors

Opening Comments:

Mounting a junction box of this kind is a common home improvement task. While many companies will allow you to pay their technician to do the install, you may have an option to do the mounting yourself in which case you can mount it exactly as you want, where you want, and have the pleasure of mounting your own box and knowing it's sturdy. In your instructor's experience, company technicians are expected to move quickly and do as many jobs as possible in one day to minimize costs. This often has resulted in work being completed with disappointing quality. For these many reasons, learning to mount your own box is a great skill

You'll use expanding plug anchors for this task, since it is almost certain that the box you are mounting will not line up with two studs. If you could mount some of the box into a pine stud, that's great! But you'll still need an anchor for the other side of the box. Expanding plug anchors are a good fit for this job since the box's force is almost all of the sheer type, and the weight of the box distributed over a few anchors certainly is well below the rated strength of the anchors.

Guide Bullets:

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

Expanding Plug anchors are the go-to anchor for anything but the lightest of mounted objects. The fact that the anchors are designed to increase the friction against the gypsum and distribute the load across more material means that a plug anchor of even the smallest diameter will be far stronger than even a decently sized nail. Nails don't expand at all, and are very smooth, meaning they have low friction and will pull out before the weight can be transfered to the gypsum panel.

Installing boxes like this one is a great way to organize your wall space efficiently and neatly. A similar set of skills can be applied to shelf mounting brackets, window blinds, and much more.

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Station 3: Positioning and hanging a picture frame

Station Goals:

Install mounting brackets on a picture frame and mount anchors in the wall to hold the frame.

Opening Comments:

A New Yorker cartoon is a great addition to any boring room or wall. Be sure to choose a cartoon that is relevant and appropriately critical (New Yorker style critical) of those folks you anticipate viewing the cartoon.

In terms of mounting a picture frame, the emphasis here is on level and location. The weight of the frame itself is likely not to lead to an anchor failure.

Guide Bullets

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

Be careful with plain nail anchors. This should be a last resort and only for the lighest of the light applications.

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Station 4: Stud finders, tension types, and comparing anchor strengths

Station Goals:

Use a stud finder to mark the studs on a wall and install various anchor types and test their failure point.

Opening Comments:

This station isn't about mounting any object but rather getting up close and personal with anchor failures. We want to use the included wire to create a mechanism for loading anchors with our body weight to create sheer force and our body weight on a hammer/level to test tension strength. This is a creative station with not many guidelines other than those below. Be creative!

Guide Bullets

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

Understanding how anchors work and how their strength varies is essential for choosing an appropriate anchor. It is often the case that stuff you by that is meant to be mounted on a wall comes with low-quality anchors that likely will be loaded at or above their safe working load limit. Installing anchors that are heavier duty and are not loaded at or above their working limit is a great way to make the stuff in your home much higher quality.

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Station 5: Self-tapping anchors

Station Goals:

Use self-tapping anchors to hang a home security control unit box level and plumb on the wall.

Opening Comments:

The creation of so-called self-tapping or self-drilling anchors is an attempt to lower the barriers for folks to install anchors in their wall. In practice, these anchors are trickier to install than expanding plug anchors since you are using the anchor itself to bore through the gypsum and create an appropriately sized hole. You are, in effect, using the anchor as the bit instead of needing to do the piloting yourself. The upside is the hole it "drills" itself is likely to be close to the optimal size.

The downside to this is that the anchor is made of plastic, and is much flimsier than a metal bit, and can break in the process of installation. Additionally, the hole it bores itself can have a ripping effect on the wall, sometimes carving out way too much of the gypsum wall, leaving you with a pilot hole that is too big for the anchor and is a nice, awful looking hole in your wall that has to be covered, patched, or both.

Note in the picture above that these anchors have a few configurations. One of the possible anchors you will use has a long, pointed tip that doesn't have threads. This will install differently than the anchors whose threading starts relatively closer to the tip. For these types, you need to be sure to screw it in slowly as it will be sheering out a bunch of gypsum board in the process.

Guide Bullets

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

These are not great anchors. They are really only applicable for use in 1/2" sheet rock. The 5/8" we're using in this course is almost too much gypsum board for these anchors. You may find yourself with a kit that provides these anchors, in which case, give 'em a try. If you are selecting an anchor for a job, try to avoid these except for that narrow use case of 1/2" dry wall.

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Station 6: High-Strength Anchors

Station Goals:

Use high-strength, plastic toggle anchors to mount a metal shelf bracket to the wall such that it is sturdy and plum.

Opening Comments:

These special toggle anchors are named by their function: they "toggle" between an insertion position and an anchoring position. Toggle anchors are innovative because designing this toggle mechanism to work reliably in a variety of thicknesses of wall is tricky. Because their shape changes dramatically from insertion to anchor mode, they can hold an incredible amount of force. The limit to these anchors basically becomes the sheer force of the diameter of the anchor downward through the gypsum. In other words, this anchor itself is unlikely to actually get yanked from the wall during failure. Rather, the integrity of an entire patch of gypsum board will need to fail and a great big chunk of wall is likely to be destroyed.

Guide Bullets

Study the following suggested list of sub-tasks or principles, create a plan, and implement it:

Applying in your home:

These are like "boutique" anchors and are great because they are strong. Their install is not without risks. If you can't get the anchor itself to toggle into its anchor position, you've got a decent hole and no good anchor. If you can use these anchors, you can probably make it through any anchoring task the universe can throw at you.

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