That looks like it’s for a hollow wall. The middle looks like it’s meant to bend to a huge diameter. If that were inside a brick hole, wouldn’t it just make around 1mm of contact at the point where it bends?

This shows ribbed plastic as suitable in masonry.

The load is a bicycle. The bike is probably around 15kg. It’s at a 45° angle so the load would be a little more than half the weight (assuming it’s the cosine of 45°, not sure), plus the rack.. all of which is well supported by cabinet hooks that take the sheer load. So the anchor in question is just holding the 45° angle of it all. After drilling deeper and adding a metal toothpick (effectively), it’s holding. But it does not feel solid so I am still looking at options.

The metal anchors you show would take on much more load. I’m not sure if I need them. How removable are they?

(edit) to give an idea of what I rigged up, the bike hangs like this:

My setup is slightly different because I have some wood on the wall and under the wheels.

Why were you drilling if it’s an existing hole?

It was not a freshly drilled hole. I would always use the same size bit as the anchor diameter so I remembered that. A 10mm anchor in a 12mm hole would also be very loose which is not the case here.

I just now drilled a bit more after realising that the anchor should probably be flush with the brick, not the 10mm of plaster layered on top of it.

You’re using a masonry bit with a hammer setting right?

Yeah, and in fact it’s not just a hand drill with a hammer setting but a proper ~10kg hammer drill with a shock absorber, a grease reservoir, and STS mounted bits (or whatever they are called). Before I bought this big gear that makes me feel like Rambo, I used a standard drill with hammer setting on poured concrete and it melted one of my bits because it had a weak hammer and spun fast enough to make the bit molten red hot.

I wouldn’t re-use this thing. This is the cheap type that comes free with things that need to be fixed to a wall.

Maybe too late to change now but I might consider a different anchor if it fails to hold my bicycle. I ended up drilling 10mm deeper so that I could push the anchor to be flush with the brick (thus 10mm recessed below the plaster layer). I also added a metal shard about the size of a toothpick between the anchor and brick. It’s holding for now but does not feel rock-solid.

Sounds like chemical anchor, which is a 2-component epoxy. I used that when installing anchors on my roof to use for abseiling. Did that because my life depended on it. But otherwise I try to avoid chemical anchors indoors because they cannot be removed later. I could get out an angle grinder at that point, but there may be a day when I decide to remove all the render to expose the natural brick, in which case the anchor would always be an eyesore.

Otherwise I quite like chemical anchors because there is less stress on the wall, and yet they are stronger than mechanical anchors.

Plastic ribbed anchors will work on concrete/brick/masonry (though I assume only solid brick, which is what I have).

The difference is load. One of the charts I linked gives a quite low load rating for plastic anchors compared to metal ones. I think they have incorporated a big safety factor but in any case I am below the load limit.

Worth noting that pro scaffolding installers drilled holes in my brick and used this same shape of ribbed plastic to secure scaffolding that workers’ safety depends on. Those were very long 12mm anchors IIRC.

Thanks! That answers my original question. 6 or 7mm will work according to this spec.

Using these plastic anchors is basically a destructive process, so I don’t see an issue with the screw cutting into the plastic.

I don’t care about the plastic but my concern is that I would make it so tight that it cracks the brick.

Another issue is often that you have hollow core bricks a

I’m sure the bricks are solid; likely 150+ years old, back when all bricks were solid. But since they are old, they are probably fragile despite being solid.

The substrate is brick (and I think it’s solid brick not the modern day hollow bricks). But brick seems to not have the ingrity of concrete as it crumbles. So after I drill I vaccum out the debris. There are no instructions because I am in fact reusing an anchor (in the same hole). I had a 6mm screw in it before and I think it spun freely before until screwed. I removed the screw to hang something slightly heavier (and thicker, thus need a longer screw). The two little wings are a bit out of shape which I think is why it spins. But I suppose that’s just to ensure it doesn’t spin while screwing and likely does nothing w.r.t pull-out strength.

Now that you triggered me to think on this more.. I suppose that’s my problem. I either need a new anchor or I need to pack something in to stop it spinning when screwing. Since 6mm worked previously I suppose it should continue to work.

what instructions?

If there had been instructions supplied, do you think they would cover the scenario of 10mm of gypsum plaster rendered over brick?

Ad pushing is only part of the problem… These tokens will kill the #InternetArchive Wayback machine. It’s anti-library tech.

Anti-bot tech is inherently anti-human.

Exactly.. that was constantly on my mind. Last time I hired a plumber to fix a leak while I was away, the plumber was incompetent. Did not find the leak (which was in /exposed/ pipework), charged 200 cash and ran with the money. The plumber actually charged 4 times as much as I paid a doctor to make a house call.

Some plumbers can legally buy sulfuric acid for this purpose. So in fact by law I was essentially being forced to hire a plumber, in effect.

My way of thinking is that I’m going to learn something & my tooling costs will be less than a plumber. I’ll “own” the problem for the next time. This one about drove me to the edge, considering I was about to experiment with borderline parasites.

A pro would have had an expensive snake cam.. so there’s that. I would not want to put my own snake cam down the pipe because it’s not made for such filthy environments.. would likely ruin the cam.

I blame whatever plumber installed the drain. They used many hard-right 90° fittings that hinder snakes. Then they installed no clean-out. And no vent. I also suspect the pipes under the floor may be goffred (accordian-like). So the lesson here is that snakes are not always the answer if the pipes are lousy.

That’s worrying just because I have a suspicion that there are accordion pipes. So I just did a test. Plugged the drain & filled the sink to the top with water. Pulled the plug and ran to the basement. There is a strong gushing from the main pipe. So I’d say at least most of the water is going to the right place. So certainly it’s not a case where the sewage found a complete alternate path. The clog is in fact gone. Though there’s always a chance of leaks, which in this case would be into or below a concrete slab.

If I’m in this forum asking why my whole kitchen floor smells like sewage in a few weeks from now, plz remind me about this.

It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.

Hope you guys enjoy not being able to search for things.

I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.

If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.

Yes, but sadly the contrary is happening. Restaurant owners now have a sneaky trick to increase tips in order to lower wages: you know those receipts & terminals that have a “suggested tip”? Yeah, those things.. they keep increasing. I was handed a PoS terminal in Netherlands (where tipping norms are like a couple euro), and the terminal asked me to tap for how much I want to tip which suggested as much as 25%.

It’s working, too. A recent article described how this trick is causing average tips to increase. So the #warOnCash is part of the problem.

It’s a kitchen drain but not like in the US. Garbage disposals are banned here. So there would be no way for wipes, qtips, or anything bigger than a pea to enter the drain. It’s a terraced house in a dense city, so no trees, which likely rules out roots.

The city water is /very/ hard, and past residents likely put plenty of oil down the drain. Every time the drain regurgitates something, it’s a stinky white substance that appears to have coffee grounds embedded in it. I know not to put oil or coffee down the drain but past residents are another story. So I think a mass of fat, coffee, and minerals from the hard water could be culprits.

WRT using a pressure washer, I think that would be an option if there were a cleanout with a straight shot. That youtuber would probably be paralyzed when coming into a ridiculous series of tight 90s and no cleanout or vent, and possibly goffred pipes. Or does he have some kind of special extra flexible high pressure hose?

It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).

① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.

You have two controls, 1 for temp and one for pressure (instead of the traditional hot and cold with independent pressure controls on each). The temp knob has a stop in one position as you turn it, which gives 38°C water. The cheaper models are external and use a wax cylinder inside:

Wax expands as it gets warm. So when you first add pressure, internally the hot water valve is 100% open. Then as the water gets hotter at the valve, it closes and starts letting cold water in to retain the temp you select. It reacts quite fast too, so even if you have screaming hot water arrive at the fixture it’s quick enough to protect you from scalding. You set it and forget it. If someone else in the house flushes a toilet or runs a washer or dishwasher, thus causing the cold water to lose pressure, the thermostatic fixture will automatically adjust to maintain the temp.

The pricier ones are internal, which means all the complex valves are buried in the wall. And instead of wax they use a bi-metallic mechanism (which exploits the fact that a couple diferent metals bend differently with temp, or something like that). They look like this:

I think that has 2 pressure knobs, one for rainfall and one for the wand.

Whole external kits with rainfall and wand start at €100. If you just want the mixer bar and wand, it can be as cheap as €25. The internal kits start at around €500. I like the external ones not just because they are cheaper, but the plumbing is simple. You just need to have hot and cold threaded ½" pipes sticking out of the wall 15cm apart, which the fixture can screw onto.

Ah, I had to zoom in to see “in trump we trust”. How disgusting.. that gives a bit more perspective.

I don’t get the “/s”.

The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.

emphasis mine:

Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

So in short:

• Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
• Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
• Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.