My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

Thanks very much for any help/advice you can give.

G

GB wrote:
My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Give it a go, and see what happens. "Drillability" depends on what the
concrete is made of, as well as the drill!


Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

A masonry bit will do the job - make sure it's not a blunt one!

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 17:22:32 +0100, "GB"
wrote:

My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

Thanks very much for any help/advice you can give.

G

Any hammer thing should do, but an SDS will eat it. The problem you
have is in the word "reinforced".

Metal in the wall will simply destroy the drill bit. Use a metal
detector and try to avoid places where it is found.

In article , GB
writes
My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

Thanks very much for any help/advice you can give.

G



Go out and buy a decent SDS and you'll wonder how you EVER managed
before without one!!!!

Theres a very good Makita one around the 100 quid mark or just less
comes with some useful bits and chisels)
--
Tony Sayer

GB wrote:
My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

Thanks very much for any help/advice you can give.

G

Hello GB
I'm no diy expert, but I did put up some stuff to enable me to hang up
my tools
in the Garage, so the same technique may apply here.

If you can manage to fasten strips of wood to your walls with a couple
of screws or whatever, you only need to screw into the strip rather
than into the wall afterwards.

Ok this wasn't reinforced concrete so GOOD LUCK

James (UkJay)

http://www.ukjay.co.uk

The message
from "GB" contains these words:

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls.

Glue battens to the walls and fix the shelves to them. Provided you're
sensible about the areas involved you'll have no trouble at all. A
couple of 3' long bits of 4x2 well stuck up with no-more-nails-alike
will take loads of weight.

But, if you must drill it, get a cheap SDS drill (they're about £30).
It'll sail through it, and usually comes with a useful selection of
adequate quality bits.

--
Skipweasel
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

GB wrote:

My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Try it and see how far you get - you may be ok with what you have. A SDS
drill will romp through it *much* faster. However even that may stop
making progress if you hit a substantial bit of rebar burried in the
concrete.

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

A standard masonry drill will do for most cases. If there is loads of
rebar reinforcement in there, then you could try one of the specialist
rebar drill bits, or one of the Bosch multimaterial drill bits (these
will drill concrete and metal without being damaged - note that you
don't want hammer action on the metal though)


--
Cheers,

John.

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| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...

A standard masonry drill will do for most cases. If there is loads of
rebar reinforcement in there, then you could try one of the specialist
rebar drill bits, or one of the Bosch multimaterial drill bits (these will
drill concrete and metal without being damaged - note that you don't want
hammer action on the metal though)

It can be quite dangerous drilling rebar.
Some panels are pre-stressed and odd things happen if you fracture the
rebar.
Ever seen concrete explode before?

GB wrote:
My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I now want to put up shelving screwed to the walls. I have a reasonably
powerful 'ordinary' hammer drill, mains powered. Black and Decker, but
fairly sturdy. This is fine for brickwork, but I'm not so sure about
concrete. Is this going to be man enough for the job, or should I buy/hire
something more powerful?

Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit do
the job?

Thanks very much for any help/advice you can give.

G


Hire a hilti gun....

"GB" wrote in message
...
My garage used to be an air raid shelter, built during the last war out of
reinforced concrete.

I don't know whether the stuff hardens with age, or they used different
mixes back then, but IME wartime mass concrete is particularly difficult
stuff to drill.

....
Also, do I need a special drill bit or will an ordinary masonry drill bit
do the job?

Even for putting holes in modern concrete, I go to a hire shop and get
something with lots of oomph.

Colin Bignell

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 11:11:33 +0100, "nightjar" nightjar@insert my
surname here.uk.com wrote:

I don't know whether the stuff hardens with age, or they used different
mixes back then, but IME wartime mass concrete is particularly difficult
stuff to drill.

It's a chemical reaction that keeps working-the stuff keeps hardening.

Diamond drill anyone??