#LATHE AND PLASTER WALL HOW TO#
#LATHE AND PLASTER WALL UPDATE#

I have 3 stud finders of different brands and none of them was worth a squat with plaster and lathe. In my experience, most stud finders are useless for your particular application. I mention all of this to illustrate the difficulties of working on very old homes. Older homes also do not have 'standard' stud spacing, so every stud has to be checked for confirmation of its existence. After cutting out a small section of wall I found that there was an extra horizontal cross board preventing me from drilling all the way down through the floor. When I went to run wire and add three-way switches so you could turn the light on/off from both doors, I had a hell of a time. One room had a single switch for the lights.

#LATHE AND PLASTER WALL UPDATE#

I did a bunch of electrical work to update and increase convenience for us. I previously owned a house built in 1920, if memory serves me right. I do much better at finding nails and staples manually with careful observation of how the piece was assembled. I ran my own tests with nails and staples in scrap wood, and most of the time it failed to detect them, even though I knew where the nails and staples were and could hold the stud finder directly over them. The metal detector in our Zircon stud finder is useless for finding individual nails and staples in old furniture. I salvage wood from old furniture for my woodworking. Stud finder metal detectors are not precision tools. It is better than nothing and not that reliable in our house, but it was the best we could find. Our Zircon stud finder has a regular and 'deep' scan mode, a metal detector, and electric current detector.

All too often I predrill through the plaster and hit air instead of a stud. I use a combination of the top of the line Zircon stud finder, neodymium (super-) magnets that I harvested from old disk drives, and the back of a spoon for the 'listen test.' I prefer spoons to light hammers for the listen test. We have a 1950s house with plaster walls.

#LATHE AND PLASTER WALL HOW TO#

Any ideas on how to locate studs and crossbeams (width) in lathe and plaster walls? I have to be careful re dust since the old paint may be lead based. The resistance to the 1/16' drill bit was mildly firm for the first 1/2' or so into the wall, then there was no resistance for about 1/4' or so, then the mild resistance returned suggesting maybe I hit some lathe.

My stud finder was inconsistent in identifying stud locations and did not appear to work, and my friend thought his stud finder worked in identifying stud locations, but when I tested the identified marked locations on the wall by drilling a 1/16' diameter hole (about 1.5' into the wall), the drill bit resistance was the same at the stud finders marked locations and everywhere in-between the marked locations, meaning neither stud finder appeared to work on the old lathe and plaster walls. I used my stud finder, and separately a friend used his (a different brand, different time) to try to locate studs and crossbeams over an entrance-way from the front room to the dining room in an old 1920's era house.

Lathe and plaster wall