I’ve moved house and am a bit pushed for space, so I’ve (tried to) mount one of these in my storage cupboard. The wall I mounted is an exterior wall – looks like 5/8″ drywall, 5/8″ air gap, brick. My first attempted ended in failure – I just mounted direct to the drywall using plastic anchor bolts, and unsurprisingly the shear force or a single road bike has (over the course of a week or so) pulled the top anchor out of the drywall.

So – attempt number 2. How should I be mounting this? I can’t for the life of me find any studs in the wall – there are a couple of vertical studs on the lower half of the wall, but they seem to stop ~1m up. I want to mount the bike rack fairly high so I can store my commuter underneath the two roadies on the rack.

I think my options are:
1) molly bolts into the drywall
2) toggle bolts into the drywall
3) tapcon (or similar) into the brick behind the drywall

Any opinions on the best option, or alternative suggestions? My worry with 1&2 is that I’m not sure I’ve got enough air gap to get the back of the toggle to open up. Worry with 3 is I’m basically adding an extra inch of leverage on the end of the tapcon, as it’ll be sticking out of the brickwork.

One (mad?) alternative – if I could find some studs (say at either end of the wall), might I be able to screw a couple of battens into the studs and on top of the dry wall, then mount the rack to the battens? Worry here is that since I’m struggling to find studs, I might end up with 1m+ battens with a load hanging in the middle of them.

Any ideas, anyone??

Try these – have dangled a TV off a plasterboard wall with success.

http://www.screwfix.com/p/hollow-wall-anchor-5-x-52mm-8-16mm-pack-of-10/12229

You’ll also need this:

http://www.screwfix.com/p/setting-tool/12429

Toolstation do equivalent.

Depends on what you want it to look like, but what about a sheet of plywood between studs? You could then have multiple screws running down each side of the plywood into the two vertical studs, then attach hooks to/through the ply.

Edit: or those anchors above, we’ve got a curtain rail held up with them. Not sure I’d personally use them to hold a bike up tbh, I’d be worried about the repeated movement from taking the bike on and off damaging the plasterboard around the hole.

Those fixings Flaperon linked to are the things to use. I have 4 bikes plus kit on a massive StorageMaker rack held up with just those.

personally I would just drill through till I hit brick

Plasterboard is incredibly weak and easily broken so i would not trust anything remotely heavy fitted to that – unless it is hitting a batten

The extra leverage on a bolt is neither here nor there as long as there is enough in the brick then it will hold

My local shop sells self taping brick bolts so drill 6mm hole and screw in

this is the sort of thing you need

self tapers

I’ve hung gun cabinets on dry lined brick walls with these. Problem solved.

http://buyrigifixonline.co.uk/

Plasterboard isn’t incredibly weak if the right fixings are used. As per flaperon those fixings will hold a lot of weight, full double radiators for example. There may not be studs to find, could be dab and dot fixing if it Plasterboard over brick. As for drilling into the brick, is it,definitely Brick? If it’s double skinned the interior brick may be the incredibly soft insulation block which won’t hold anything. How old is the House?

Our 40″ heavy TV hangs on a few of THESE
Need the appropriate size drill bit to make the hole (20mm for these ones but there are also 15 and 25mm ones).

Thanks for the replies so far! Current front runners are

1) rigifix bolts directly through the single top mount on the rack
2) a batten secured by multiple rigifix bolts / molly bolts, then mount the rack to that

I think I’ll probably try #1 and if that doesn’t hold, go for #2. The “single bolt hole at the top” on this rack is not a great piece of design TBH – it focuses all the shear force through a single point!

@bails I don’t really mind what it looks like – I can always paint over battens or plywood – but leaning towards two battens rather than a full sheet of ply

@stumpyjon I pulled the old plastic anchor from the drywall and it looks like brick to me – is there any well to tell brick vs interior brick? It was quite the effort to drill into when I was sticking the plastic anchor in! House (well, flat) is 1960s/70s, ex-local authority build.

Personally I wouldn’t use the things Flaperon linked to, I would drill though till I hit brick and use anchor bolts.

Mounting a tv might be fine, although again I wouldn’t, as once fitted its not going to be touched. Lifting a bike on and off a mount will eventually weaken the area where those fixing are mounted.

Plus I’ve found that those fittings can be a bit of a bugger if they don’t grip the plasterboard first time, so they end up spinning round and can’t be tightened properly.

Our workshop is concrete block sheel with 15cm on Celotex on the inside, then plastboard. I was fixing some stall bars at the WE and had a similar problem to the OP. In the end I fixed 8mm stud through the wall, bolted it to outside wall and then fixed it to a 15mm ply plate on the inside and fixed the stall bars to that. That way they pull directly on the outside wall, not on the 15cm of Celotex…

[url=https://flic.kr/p/Uq7AWY]Stall bars[/url] by Ben Freeman, on Flickr