Stopped fighting my stud finder, now I just map the wall with a fridge magnet

For years I'd swear by my electronic stud finder, even after it told me there was a stud 6 inches to the left of where the baseboard nail actually was. Last month I was hanging a heavy shelf in my hallway and got so fed up with the beeping that I grabbed a rare earth magnet from my toolbag, the kind I use to pick up screws from carpet. I swept it across the drywall, it latched onto the drywall screws in the studs, and I marked every single one with a pencil dot in about 3 minutes. Turns out the drywall screws are never perfectly spaced, but the magnet gives you the exact center line, no guessing. I've now hung 4 shelves and a mirror that way, including a 70 pound cabinet in my garage, and I haven't touched the stud finder since. Has anyone else ditched the fancy electronics for a simple magnet trick, or am I just late to this party?

1 comments

1 Comment

taraw1616d ago

That magnet trick is genius, and honestly it makes way more sense once you think about it. The stud finder is basically guessing based on density changes, but the magnet is giving you the actual physical proof of where the screws are. I started doing something similar after my kid knocked a picture off the wall and I noticed the anchor marks were way off from where the stud finder said. Now I keep a small neodymium magnet on a string in my toolbox, it swings and sticks right to the screw heads like a little metal detector. The only downside is when you hit a metal mesh patch or something weird in the wall, that throws you off, but that's rare enough that it doesn't matter. If you really want to level up, mark the top and bottom screw on each stud, then snap a chalk line between them, you get the whole stud layout in one shot.