Hi and house bashing tips?

[overskilled]

Hi,
Just been given access to here.
Used to do electrical work in the IT sector so technically able enough, but recently had a change of circumstances so made a sideways move into self employment and into domestic electrical work with some general maintenance work as a sideline, but I could do with some tips on the house bashing side - best / quickest ways to cut channels, finding walls from above, cutting access panels into floors etc stuff like that really.
(Yes I know these are simple things to most but server rooms tend not to have wet plastered walls etc
Thanks

 

[pennywise]

Cutting channels= chasing machine
finding walls from above =tape measure.
Cutting access panels= fein cutter or cavity master
finding ceiling joists above finished ceilings= strong magnet

 

[Strima]

To find water pipes etc I find a saw is good... :lol:

 

[trev]

Terrible breach of practice here. Your first question in here is supposed to be what are you having lads

 

[alarm man]

30 posts in 18 months and arms,its getting watered down daily..

 

[overskilled]

Alarm man - I don't post a lot on any forum, lately in particular due to "personal reasons" - read marriage went down the plughole in a very messy way, read a lot still yes, post...not so much, even on some of the IT forums I used to post on relatively frequently, my post count never went above 2k.

Trev - My apologies, appears a lack of suitable intoxicating beverages in my locus has made me forget proper drinking establishment etiquette.

Strima - I find some really long nails tend to find pipes and hidden cables incredibly well, even ones the expensive pipe and metal detector misses....(thats a joke by the way....)

Pennywise - Thanks, I figured as much but I figure the only stupid question is the one you don't ask. The wall question came about as in my own place, some of the walls in the attic aren't located in the same place as the walls/rooms below....(its a weirdly built house in terms of layout and building methods used....including a fantastic collection of walls built of a random collection of normal brick and incredibly hard engineered brick....sometimes within the same wall....I think they used whatever they had going spare tbh)

 

[Paul.M]

Welcome to the Arms. Buy an sds with chase function on it and away you go, you will get the hang of it after a short while. As for floor boards I use a stanley knife for the cutting the tongue and circular saw for cutting across the boad but be careful when doing this, try and keep all your fingers and toes. I'll only say that in here and not in the open forum incase someone trys it and had a mishap.

 

[overskilled]

paul- cheers for that, considered a wall chaser as mentioned above, but the dust created is an issue (some of my clients are.....fanatically house proud to put it mildly) so alternative options are always a good thing.

Flooring chisels much good or limited use? (most houses round my way are 1950's or older build so are wooden floorboards, but there's more and more new stuff being built, which of course in the main is all sheet flooring - chipboard etc)

Access panels for underfloor access i.e. crawling through the founds to add new cabling or repair someone else's concealed bodges, (most places have had hatches cut previously, but there's a few out there that haven't seen work since they were built....elderly residents who moved in when they were built new postwar and who are now moving on and new owners want the place upgraded understandably) Your idea is what I would likely went with anyway, but its good to get confirmation.

Thanks for the help guys, its appreciated.

 

[ackbarthestar]

1/ My preferred method of running cables down walls is, after the chopping out, plastic oval conduit held in with adapted crampets and then open it up with a former to fit snugly into metal back boxes without the need of open grommets. Also good for dabbed plasterboard walls.

2/ Another tip is that you can get plastic T&E clips into skimmed cement by applying small taps.

3/ Getting T&E cable flat and straight on the walls (dressed) is to hold the loose end with one hand while running the middle of the hammerhead of a claw hammer along the length you are about to clip

4/ Best tip = practice until perfect

Too much to drink tonight and forgot the way out :teeth_smile:

 

[Rockingit]

Tools useful to have in the house bashers armoury:

Decent set of rods, steel fish tape, decent head torch, knee pads, extra long wood bits and extender, 4"+ hole saw for getting your hand into stud/boarded floors, dual-print tape measure (as in, legend on both sides - you'll know why next time you measure for a downlight), sharp bolster, packet of plasters, 12", 24" and 6' levels, dust masks, lightweight gloves for lifting loft insulation.

And I'm sure now everyone else can point out the essentials I've just overlooked.....

 

[i=p/u]

whats the crack about the magnet , does this pick up plasterboard screws or old clout nails or what... i always end up drilling few holes till i find them..

i know is better way, and as you are suggesting a magnet im thinking 'ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

 

[oldtimer]

Welcome and I dont do house bashing so as the dragons say I am out

 

[telectrix]

locating in attic. drill hole in ceiling ( 3/8" ) . poke up rod with LED light on end. find in attic. chasing is quickest with a chaser, burt, as you say, dust everywhere. a rotary stop sds with a chisel is much cleaner. for weetabix floors, i use a circ. saw set at a bit less than the thickness of the floor, then afterwards, bodge it as best i can.

 

[Mark_Burgess]

Well, your username does not refer to this line of work!!

 

[Adam W]

How would I go about making a sideways move into IT work? I've mainly done commercial and industrial work, which is considered more technically demanding than just house-bashing so I suppose I would be 'overskilled' in the IT world...

 

[Knobhead]

Overskilled in what exactly?

 

[overskilled]

Overskilled is a flippant reference to comments made by several interviewers, NOT my view of my own skillset (I'm not that big headed )

To go sideways into IT move to Mumbai and learn to limbo

 

[ackbarthestar]

How would I go about making a sideways move into IT work? I've mainly done commercial and industrial work, which is considered more technically demanding than just house-bashing so I suppose I would be 'overskilled' in the IT world...

Your probably better off in the commercial/industrial electrical market. and look at plcs and something like OPCan network control systems

It used to be easy when you could build and maintain PCs and network servers and then install the thin eathernet or cat5/e infrastructures. There is still some of that about but unless you've got something like mcse or cisco quals or even software programming training then your options are rather limited.

However, computer science training is always usefull in the electrical control and automation business

 

[overskilled]

I looked at the MCITP Enterprise Administrator (replacement for the MCSE) qualification recently and the training (from LearnKey at least) is a mess, a ton of base level stuff, then a massive jump to ultra advanced level training, with nothing in between, so you end up insanely bored then scrabbling to keep up with what the next session is about and having to do a ton of research into acronyms, americanisms, command structures (as all of sudden they decide to skim over the commands) and watching the tutorials 10 or 20 times to get your head around what they are asking. Then you find out that they have missed out stuff that actually is in the exam and filled the course with a sizeable amount of stuff that isn't in the exam and hasn't been since the draft version of the syllabus.
Plus the wages frequently stink £20K per annum in central london with little or no benefits, unpaid overtime and a load of responsibility beyond the pay, only good money is in investment banking IT and thats a tough nut to crack unless you have a finance or economics background or walk out of a degree course with a high scoring masters degree / Phd. Not to mention the near nonstop offshoring of work and the drive down on pay by "internal transfers" from 3rd world nations.

 

[overskilled]

IT has a lot more to it than most people see. When you get into strategic network planning for a multinational and have to co-ordinate between 5 or 10 different divisions all in different time zones and are dealing with some who don't speak english it gets "fun".
Real fun is a role I missed out on sadly due to being elsewhere when the role was advertised, which was doing support for the Large Hadron Collider IT systems, role sounded challenging but at the same time well resourced and enjoyable.