Bolt From The Blue

 Written on 9th April 2025 

After much trepidation and hesitation I went ahead and did it. I installed two anchor bolts on the wall to fix a clamp for my resistance band. And quite successfully so. I have been missing such a clamp in the house for a long time (you can do certain exercises only if you have this) but shied away from installing it as I had no idea how to do it perfectly. It has to be very strongly driven into the wall. In olden days people would typically cement them in with the help of a mason. It is not as invasive an operation as that any more but it requires knowledge and experience.

A few weeks ago I had to repair a broken small bracket on the tube light in Mampu's room. It had broken off. A mini success with that prompted me to go ahead an install a brass hook on the wall for hanging my helmet. Encouraged by its success I installed three of them for all my helmets. I even fixed the board for the various keys. It used to earlier hang off the wall like a photo frame.

Each of these involved making a hole (in fact two) in the wall, putting a nylon plug in and then driving the screw in with the Bosch drilling machine. After this mini success I considered using Rawl bolts to install this D bracket. Rawl bolts are heavy duty stuf but they have a beauty that you can take the bolt out because it is screwed in and not hammered. And it has very high strength to hold really heavy forces (depending on the size you choose). Once you screw the bolt in the plug that is hammered in expands into the wall and makes a very strong grip.

I ordered the bracket/clamp off Amazon a few days ago. It came with four Rawl plugs/bolts as it has four eyelets on either side. These were 10 mm bolts which looked like an overkill for my purpose. So I ordered a few 6 mm bolts. 

They arrived today and I got down to the job - complete with my head lamp, eye cover for dust and everything else. This "everything" else included the following things 

The Bosch drill

10 mm masonary drill bit

Cellotape and scissors (to mark the drill bit for depth)

Pencil (for 90 degree vertical alignment line)

Spirit Level

Hammer (to drive the plug in)

The bolts (obviously)