How to hang items on solid brick walls covered in plaster?

I have a 1920's Solid Brick house. The internal walls are brick with a plaster covering.
Probably 1/3 of the time when I try to drill with a hammer drill into my walls to insert a plug and screw to hang things , I drill on the edge of the brick and the drill ends up slipping into the mortar between the bricks and make a mess / large hole and sometimes causing a junk of plaster to be remove.

Is there any way to detect where the bricks / mortar are under the plaster to ensure I am going to drill into the brick proper and not the edge?

regards

Tony.

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EricL

Hello @awlwiles

Welcome to the Bunnings workshop community. It's sensational to have you join us, and thanks for sharing your question about hanging items on your brick wall.

Before you go any further, I recommend holding off any further drilling and strongly advise having the plaster on your wall tested for asbestos. You'll find some helpful information in this guide: Asbestos for households and the general public. If your plaster tests as negative, I recommend having a look at this guide - How to hang just about anything by @Adam_W.

One way to remember where the center of the brick is to refer to the last hook you mounted on your wall successfully. With this reference, you'll be able to more or less estimate where the main body of the brick is and avoid hitting the mortar in between.

Other than this, I'm not aware of a technique that you can use to pre-determine the position of the brick.

Let me call on our experienced members @Dave-1, @Nailbag and @TedBear for their recommendations.

If you have any other questions we can help with, please let us know.

Eric

Nailbag

The only was to find the centre of a brick behind glued plasterboard is to make small vertical holes with a concrete nail. Your 1920's house as @EricL has highlighted is most likely using plasterboard with asbestos. This type of board is extremely dense as you probably already know and full of thick horse-hair liker fibres. So as suggested its worth gaining that info upfront.

Setting aside the asbestos issue, bricks are roughly 75mm high with 10-12mm of mortar spacing them vertically. making a series of 2.5mm holes in a straight vertical line say 80mm. Then tap in the nail in to each hole. If you hit mortar it will be soft-ish and you will be able to tap it in further, but don't. Wiggly the nail out and keep going until you hit brick which will be solid. It is possible there are timber battens between, in which case you make hit one of this first?

Once you have establish where the mortar lines are you can take hight measurements and fill the holes. These measurement now become your template for anywhere around the house.

I'm a huge fan of these fasteners which are available in a couple of different sizes and extremely easy to use and have great load ratings.

Hope that helps.

Nailbag

Dave-1

Morning @awlwiles

Yeah I do understand your feeling of frustration 😕 It would be a pain trying to figure out.

Pretty much along the lines of @EricL and @Nailbag in taking the last few succesful holes that didnt blow out and extrapolating the brick from there. If you have two good points or even one and a bad point you should be able to sketch up the patten of brick on your wall. If you can meausure the outside brick Id hope its going to be the same size brick as inside.

We were just talking about the non drill options for hanging a frame in one of these questions the other day, I am not sold on them but now have enough of a question to actually give them a go. (just as an alternative potential)

Dave

awlwiles

Thank you to everyone for their tips and advice. Unfortunately, on the wall I am working on there is no existing reference point. I will try the nail method to test before drilling. Regarding asbestos, I will look at getting it tested. The plaster does not look like sheets and does not have fibres in it. Instead it looks like the plaster has been manually applied with a trowel when the house was built long ago. regards Tony Lewis.

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