Eighty per cent of every project involves putting things together. (The rest is 10 per cent building the pieces and 10 per cent applying the bandages.) So for those of you who have not embraced duct tape as the Handyman’s Secret Weapon, you have a lot of thinking to do. Deciding exactly how you’re going to attach the pieces to each other is often the most important aspect of the entire project.
There are a wide variety of fasteners available, each of which is designed for a specific application.
Standard nails. Nails are the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to attach most things to other things, but they do have several inadequacies. They are most effective going into wood, less so going into concrete, and if you’re trying to drive a nail into a steel I-beam, you obviously have a severe mental problem. Even with wood, nails are most effective in preventing lateral movement, like when a stud is attached to a header. They have virtually no tensile holding ability, as you discover when you put a nail into the ceiling and hang a chandelier from it. Choosing the length and thickness of a nail is also important. Trying to hammer a ¼-inch diameter nail into a 5/16-inch piece of trim is probably not going to go well. The length is also a factor, as the nail needs to go far enough into the wall that it will hold up your painting, but not far enough into the wall that it removes your neighbour’s painting.
Specialty nails. Drywall nails, spiral nails, concrete nails, etc.—this is all just mutton dressed as lamb. These nails have small barbs on the shaft, or spiral threads to help them hold, but they’re still easy to pull out. Concrete nails are too hard to bend, which often makes them too hard to hit.
Screws. Definitely a step up from nails, screws come in a wide range of types and materials and have a lot more tensile strength than any nail. They’re slower to install, but much safer. Nobody ever hit their thumb with a screwdriver.
Bolts. We’re getting serious now. All of the good points of nails and screws, with much more tensile strength. If you put an eyebolt through the kitchen ceiling with a washer the size of a dinner plate and a locking nut on top, you can hang a side of buffalo meat on it. The drawback of bolts is that you must have access to both sides of the surface. It’s like selling magazine subscriptions by phone—you need to have a nut on the other end.
So that’s more or less the range of available fasteners, and you may still be wondering which of them is best for your job and what size should you get and all the rest of it. Well, it’s really just basic physics. What forces are in play and what direction are they pulling?
If you’re mounting a picture on the wall, you have tangential gravitational pull equal to the picture’s weight. Even a small nail will do the job. If you’re hanging a full suit of armour, the three-dimensional aspect of it will create a horizontal tensile pull, making a nail unfeasible, so you’ll have to go with the heftiest screw you can find. (Let’s pause for a second and make up our own punch lines.) If you’re wealthy enough to own a double-wide, you have access to both sides of the wall and can therefore use a bolt.
The general rule with fasteners is that if they’re stronger than the wall or ceiling they’re attached to, when there’s an overload (like Uncle Bob doing his Tarzan impersonation from your chandelier), you want the fastener to let go, rather than the structure to collapse. So before attaching anything to anything, assess the structural integrity of the anchoring wall, and use a fastener that’s just slightly weaker than that. That’s the way to get maximum strength from your fastener without putting your security deposit at risk.