I need to move/add a number of sockets, as a number of them will involve cables passing through the wall I would like to get away with disturbing the plaster as little as possible. I am considering investing in a box sinker. The walls in our property are mainly breeze block with some brick walls. Has anyone any experience using these tools and which manufacturer would they recommend?

Richard

On Thursday 09 January 2014 14:20 Tricky Dicky wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I need to move/add a number of sockets, as a number of them will involve
cables passing through the wall I would like to get away with disturbing
the plaster as little as possible. I am considering investing in a box
sinker. The walls in our property are mainly breeze block with some brick
walls. Has anyone any experience using these tools and which manufacturer
would they recommend?


They are OK on breeze/celcon block and rubbish on brick (unless very soft).
--
Tim Watts Personal Blog: http://squiddy.blog.dionic.net/

http://www.sensorly.com/ Crowd mapping of 2G/3G/4G mobile signal coverage

On 09/01/2014 14:20, Tricky Dicky wrote:
I need to move/add a number of sockets, as a number of them will involve cables passing through the wall I would like to get away with disturbing the plaster as little as possible. I am considering investing in a box sinker. The walls in our property are mainly breeze block with some brick walls. Has anyone any experience using these tools and which manufacturer would they recommend?

Richard


I use a Quadcut. It's nice and fast in block, slower into brick, but
still works fine. It always needs some filling if you go into a
plastered wall though. It's fine going in and you think you can get away
with little to no filling. Then you finish cutting and start trying to
pull the thing back out of the hole...

Cheers,

Colin.

In article ,
Tricky Dicky writes:
I need to move/add a number of sockets, as a number of them will involve cables passing through the wall I would like to get away with disturbing the plaster as little as possible. I am considering investing in a box sinker. The walls in our property are mainly breeze block with some brick walls. Has anyone any experience using these tools and which manufacturer would they recommend?

I bought a kit with a circular cutter and a square frame for finishing
off. This was when I was rewiring a kitchen and bathroom, and the walls
are all 1909 solid brick (not very hard brick though). The circular cutter
worked well in the brick, but the square frame for finishing off was
completey useless - it would just jam in the wall, and it was much
easier to use an SDS chisel bit for squaring out the circular holes.

The cutter did 25 holes before it very suddenly stopped working, having
gone blunt. It's not viable to sharpen it, so that's its lifetime.
You would do better in modern thermal blocks, but if you really have
breeze (unlikely) or clinker (more likely) blocks, the life would
probably be somewhere in between.

The cutter generates enormous quantities of dust - if you assume the
debris from the hole all turns into airbourne dust, you won't be far
off.

If you aren't in a hurry and don't have loads of holes to sink, I would
suggest drilling out a row of holes around the edge of the hole, and
then drilling diagonally to run them into each other, and finish by
knocking out the centre and cleaning up with an SDS chisel bit. I was
doing some of this myself in my parents' house just recently. Disruption
to neighbouring plaster was very little, and you can improve on this by
scoring the surface of the plaster around the box outline with a Stanley
knife before you start drilling (it completely knakers the blade of
course).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Thanks for all the help. Looks like I will be doing it the "traditional" way drilling and chiselling.

Richard

On 10/01/2014 14:58, Tricky Dicky wrote:


Thanks for all the help. Looks like I will be doing it the "traditional" way drilling and chiselling.

I find a combination of 20mm chisel in the sds to sink the periphery
cut, and then a 40 mm chisel to chop and plane out the waste works well
and quickly even in fairly hard brick.


--
Cheers,

John.

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

On Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:47:54 PM UTC, Andrew Gabriel wrote:

If you aren't in a hurry and don't have loads of holes to sink, I would
suggest drilling out a row of holes around the edge of the hole, and
then drilling diagonally to run them into each other, and finish by
knocking out the centre and cleaning up with an SDS chisel bit. I was
doing some of this myself in my parents' house just recently. Disruption
to neighbouring plaster was very little, and you can improve on this by
scoring the surface of the plaster around the box outline with a Stanley
knife before you start drilling (it completely knakers the blade of
course).

I hate chain drilling. Why not 4 cuts with an angle grinder?


NT

wrote:

I hate chain drilling. Why not 4 cuts with an angle grinder?

The usual reasons?
Dust and ending up with cuts resembling # rather than []

On Saturday, January 11, 2014 2:32:16 AM UTC, Andy Burns wrote:
wrote:

I hate chain drilling. Why not 4 cuts with an angle grinder?

The usual reasons?
Dust and ending up with cuts resembling # rather than []

Dust: a cyclone vac nozzle by the workpiece works wonders.
# cut: inevitable, but its only a bit of filling
I'd far rather do this than chain drill.


NT

On Thu, 9 Jan 2014 06:20:57 -0800 (PST), Tricky Dicky
wrote:

I need to move/add a number of sockets, as a number of them will involve cables passing through the wall I would like to get away with disturbing the plaster as little as possible. I am considering investing in a box sinker. The walls in our property are mainly breeze block with some brick walls. Has anyone any experience using these tools and which manufacturer would they recommend?


Having been through this situation a couple of times during the last
couple of years on plastered block walls I have tried stitch drilling
(neat but slow) sds chisel (fast but messy and a lot of filling to do
afterwards and a box sinker and cutter (cutter was OK but box was
hopeless). Having someone with the nozzle of a decent industrial type
vac close to the work area does help keep the mess down considerably.

The most successful compromise to date has been a manual scutch chisel
http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Scutch+Chisel/p18718 to cut the
outline hole, followed by sds chisel to hack most of the interior out
and finishing with the scutch chisel. This method seems to leave the
least amount of making good to do and generates the least amount of
dust.

I understand that Armeg do an sds scutch chisel comb holder which I
will look at using the next time this comes up (fairly soon SWMBO
advises me).
--
rbel