Drilled hole in wall, too big. How to fix?

[AmitG]

I drilled a hole in an internal brick wall using a 6mm drill bit. About 40mm deep.

I've done lots of them before, with no problem, but for some reason this one turned into a right mess. The sides of the hole looked jagged and the rawlplug wouldn't go in properly. I tried to tidy it up with a bigger drill bit, with the utterly predictable result that the hole is now too big, and is still a right mess.

I think that the problem was the 6mm drill bit. It was designed for brickwork, and I used it on all the other holes, but part of the tip seems to have broken off and perhaps that caused it to make a mess. I'm pretty sure that the brickwork itself is not the problem.

Anyway - I need to re-use the hole and basically salvage the situation.

How do I do this?

I thought of packing the hole with filler and then re-drilling, but I can't see how I would get filler all the way down the hole, and I'm not sure it would help anyway.

The hole is for a medium duty picture hook so it needs to be a fairly robust job.

Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks.

Oh, and merry Christmas everyone

[AmitG]

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions so far.

I'm going to try them in order.

So matchsticks first. This sounds like the easiest option.

If that doesn't work I'll get a bit of 7mm or 8mm dowel, hammer it in, drill pilot hole then screw in (no rawlplug).

Failing both of those I'll try a brown rawlplug - though I'm not sure whether I'll need a bigger screw as well - that would be a problem since the picture hook can't take a screw bigger than the one I'm using at present.

And if all that fails I'll try Gripfill.

Moving the hole isn't an option, since the picture in question has to go in this exact location. Hence the need to "save" the hole.

I will report back...thanks again!

[AmitG]

226bhp said:

stuartmmcfc said:

The Christmas spirit is strong on PH.
Loads of replies bit not one taking the piss out of such fkwittery.

I don't think we have the full story and doubt it's a brick wall internally....

Should have been clearer. It's a party wall between two terraced houses (that's what I meant by internal wall - as in, not facing the elements). Absolutely definitely brick.

[AmitG]

It's sorted

For the first hole, I got some long matches and cut the abrasive ends off. Put the rawlplug in half way, then crammed in a couple of matches alongside, hammered the whole lot home and broke off the ends of the matches so that it was all flush with the wall. Then hammered in another match in the remaining visible gap. It all felt firm, so I screwed on the picture hook and it was fixed solid - no movement whatsoever - so job done on that one.

For the other hole, I tried matches again but I wasn't terribly happy with the result. So I got some old dowel rod, tapered the end slightly, hammered it in, and then sawed it off in the hole before hammering home so that it was flush with the wall. Drilled a pilot hole, screwed in and again it felt solid. Job done.

Here is the finished result (click to view bigger version). The picture is a hand-drawn panorama taken from Greenwich Observatory, London. It was done by a local architect friend who is rather good at freehand sketching of the built environment. He did this one in a couple of hours. All done freehand, onsite, in one sitting, using a roller ball pen. No ruler, no pencil markings, no photographs. I will put more details, and some other pics, in the "artwork on your walls" thread.



I did think about just drilling 2 new holes, but I was worried that without knowing exactly what went wrong with the first 2, I could end up with 2 more problems. And I wanted to solve the original problem somehow. Drilling new holes felt like admitting defeat.

I also considered bigger rawlplugs, but they needed bigger screws, and 6mm was the absolute max that the picture hook could take.

Massive thanks to everyone for their suggestions and for not calling me a spacktard

[AmitG]

I'm pretty certain that it was the drill bit. The end was damaged (with a small piece missing) and I reckon that's what caused it.

As per stuartmmcfc's and jon's comments, I also found that the drill speed was quite low, because I didn't reset it after doing another job, which probably didn't help.

So I'm guessing that : damaged drill bit + too low speed = fail.

New drill bit will be bought tomorrow.

Edited by AmitG on Friday 26th December 17:26

[AmitG]

Mr GrimNasty said:

AmitG said:

I'm pretty certain that it was the drill bit. The end was damaged (with a small piece missing) and I reckon that's what caused it.

A masonry bit typically has a tungsten carbide 'blade' brazed into a slot on the end of the steel shaft. If you overheat it by drilling too fast/long in a hard substrate, or get too rough with the hammer, or it just wears out from use, it can fall out, so you are left trying to drill with a blunt bit of steel.

Looks like that's exactly what happened. One side of the "blade" is missing. That combined with too low a speed probably did it for me.

[AmitG]

sparkythecat said:

Sheepshanks said:

Having now seen the picture: seriously? Just hammer a couple of picture hooks into the wall.

No point making a load of muck and mess drilling and plugging a 6mm hole when you can just hammer in a 2mm steel pin.

Maybe picture hooks would have worked in this case, but I wasn't sure.

The picture is about 120cm long and maybe 40cm deep, in a box frame. I haven't weighed it, but I would estimate maybe 5kg all in.

It's positioned just above a bed headboard, so if it fell off the wall it could have serious consequences.

Given that, I decided to err on the side of caution, and use screw-in hooks.

They are definitely overkill - I have used the same hooks to hang pictures more than triple the size - but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry!