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Anchor fasteners are an indispensable type of fastener used to attach and mount fixtures to various surfaces including concrete, masonry, drywall, hollow walls, and more. This comprehensive guide dives deep into the world of anchor fasteners to help you understand the different types available and how to select the right ones.
Anchor fasteners are a special type of fastening system engineered to allow you to securely attach objects, fixtures, equipment, and building materials into or onto base materials like concrete, masonry, drywall, wood, and other surfaces.
These unique fasteners work by mechanically gripping the base material on one side, while providing a threaded cavity on the other side to drive a screw into. This threaded hole allows you to then fasten your fixture or object to the anchor.
The exact mechanism that an anchor fastener uses to grip the base material varies depending on the specific type of anchor:
So, while anchor fastener designs vary widely, they all rely on some sort of bracing, gripping, wedging, flaring, or threading action to achieve a solid hold in the base material. This is what gives anchor fasteners far greater pullout resistance compared to traditional screws alone.
Anchor fasteners use various anchoring mechanisms, each engineered to establish a robust connection with the base material:
Hollow Wall Toggle Anchors: These anchors are designed for hollow wall applications and provide secure and reliable support. | |
Kaptoggle Anchors: Versatile and easy to use, these anchors are suitable for lightweight applications, including hanging pictures, curtain hardware, and signs. | |
Drywall Sammy Screws: Versatile and easy to use, these anchors are suitable for lightweight applications, including hanging pictures, curtain hardware, and signs. | |
Self Drilling Anchors: Known for their ease of installation, self-drilling anchors are perfect for non-masonry walls, ensuring secure attachments without the need to locate wall studs. | |
Toggle Wing Anchors: These anchors are ideal for light to medium-duty applications in hollow walls. They use toggle wings to provide a steadfast hold. |
Angled Framing Anchors: Essential for securing wood posts to surfaces like concrete footings, wooden footings, or supporting beams. | |
Hurricane Ties: Designed to provide structural stability, hurricane ties are crucial for securing your deck against strong winds. | |
Joist Hangers: These anchors ensure the stability of your deck's structure by securing joists to supporting beams. | |
Post Base Anchors: Post base anchors form the foundation of most decks, providing stability to wood posts attached to concrete footings. | |
Post Cap Anchors: Post cap anchors offer additional support to your deck by securing posts and beams together. | |
Wood Sammy Screws: Versatile and easy to use, these screws are perfect for lightweight applications, ensuring secure attachments. |
Double Expansion Anchors: Medium-duty anchors that distribute themselves evenly along the pre-drilled hole's walls, minimizing the risk of cracking in brick and block. | |
Drop-In Anchors: Suitable for solid concrete, these anchors facilitate fastening a bolt into the anchor's internal threading, making them ideal for flush-mount applications. | |
Hammer Drive Pin Anchors: Light-duty and easy to install, these anchors are perfect for fastening plywood to concrete, brick, block, and mortar. | |
Lag Shields: Used with lag screws, these medium-duty anchors create a secure anchor point in concrete. | |
Machine Screw Anchors: Medium-duty anchors that work similarly to drop-in anchors but are compatible with machine screws for securely anchoring fixtures to masonry materials. | |
Masonry Concrete Screws: Known as "Tapcons," these screws drill their own hole and thread themselves directly into concrete, brick, or masonry materials. | |
Concrete Sammy Screws: Versatile and easy to use, these screws are perfect for lightweight applications, ensuring secure attachments. | |
Sleeve Anchors: Reliable anchoring solutions that compress a split expansion sleeve against the walls of a pre-drilled concrete hole. | |
Wedge Anchors: Renowned for their exceptional strength, these heavy-duty anchors are used in structural applications and offer unmatched load-bearing capacity. |
In summary, anchor fasteners play a crucial role in ensuring secure fixture attachment across various surfaces. The choice of the right anchor depends on your specific needs, and understanding the diverse anchor types and their applications is essential for successful installations. Explore our selection of anchor fasteners for your next project or seek expert advice from us.
The Types of Masonry Anchors & Screws |
Masonry Anchors and Screws TranscriptScroll Down To Continue Reading Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners - Fasteners 101. I'm Bob and today we're gonna talk about masonry fasteners. So let's get started. So I have here a variety of masonry fasteners that I'm going to run through. I'm just going to work straight across the table here. This is this basically education for you of different types of fasteners that are used in masonry products. The first one I have here is a masonry drop-in anchor this is mostly used in poured concrete. These are commonly installed for high strength applications. Where you're using a bolt to actually drive into the threaded drop-in. You can also get these in coil thread. So if you're a masonry contractor and you want to use coil threaded rod, which is a more coarse type thread, we have those also. This tool is a set tool to set the drop-in anchor. I should also note that these drop-in anchors you can also get them with a lip on them. This particular one, it has no lip and the reason for the lip would be to prevent the drop-in anchor from dropping too far into the concrete. A lot of contractors like that type of a drop-in anchor. Once you have the drop-in anchor in the hole, you put this tool (in), you hit it with a hammer and it sets it in position. Then you can drive in or put your bolt in; whatever you're fastening to the concrete. The next masonry fastener; I have an anchor which is a lag screw anchor (lag shield). So this anchor this is almost the same as putting in drop-in. It's just another type of drop in. Once you have this in place in the concrete you then can screw in the lag screw and then you can see the anchor starts to spread on both sides. Basically, you're looking at pressure on the walls of the concrete hole. Both of these fasteners require you drilling a hole that is equal to the circumference of the drop-in. So if this was a 1/2" inch outside diameter you drill in a 1/2" inch hole. Same thing with this drop-in, not the size of the bolt that you're going to put in there. The next (anchor) I have are a masonry, or a term used: Tapcon, concrete screws. For fixing wood to a block wall, wood to a concrete floor, metal, whatever you want to fasten. Angles, metal steel angles, many different applications. These are the probably the most used masonry anchor out there. You can get these in hex head and Phillips. I'm showing you Phillips head, Phillips flat head. Obviously if you use a Phillips flat head you can countersink these into the the wood so that the head doesn't stick up if you have that type of application. These are the most used masonry anchors on the market. Next I have what they call a threaded rod Sammy (Sammys screw). Sammy's are used for overhead application typically. You would put these, drill a hole in your deck above, you would drive this in with a driver: a nut driver or a socket into the concrete and then you would put a piece of threaded rod in here and it would hang down. You cut the threaded rod to the size that you're trying to hang to and that would be the use of a sammys. Sammy is a brand name out there but there are many other companies that make this product. The next we have is a hammer driver pin. This is mostly used (as I've seen these used) for fastening plywood to a concrete floor. If you have a basement you want the wood flooring down, you want to put a sub-floor down, well you can use this anchor for that purpose. How this anchor works is that you would drill a hole to the size of this anchor diameter and then right through the wood to the concrete, drop this until it's flush to the plywood and then hammer down the nail, that nail becomes flush with the top, and you're done. It's anchored to the concrete. It's a very quick way to fasten plywood to many different surfaces, to walls, many other things. It's a very handy anchor. The next one I have is a toggle wing for hollow wall. If you know you have a hollow block wall and the block is not filled with concrete, you can use one of these in a hollow wall. These are also widely used in dry wall. Hanging different products, this is not a heavyweight anchor. I would not use this to hang your TV off a drywall wall. If you have a flat screen TV that weighs, you know, I'm just gonna use a number, 60 pounds or 70 pounds this is not the proper anchor for that. It'll probably just rip the drywall right off the wall. And that has a combo Phillips (Slotted) head so you can use a flat screwdriver or a Phillips screwdriver to drive that in. The next one I have is a double expansion shield. This is made for brick and block. I think mostly this is used in brick. How this works is you put the screw in. When you drive the screw in it starts to pull on the two ends and then you could see there it expands and it'll only expand so much. The reason why they use these in brick and block is not to crack the brick. A lot of times if you use a wedge anchor or a sleeve anchor the brick will crack and the end result is you don't have a good holding anchor. So possibly the anchor could pull out depending on what you're hanging on the substrate. You can see how that works. To give you an idea, if you have a brick wall in your house and you want to hang something from it, this is a good anchor to use for that. The next (masonry anchor) I have here is a sleeve anchor. This one has a nut. There are different varieties of sleeve anchors. These are just the parts separating the different parts to a sleeve anchor this is the complete one. So this would just slide on to here and it's put back on. All right, that's how it goes together. This application also is made for brick or block and can be used in concrete. It is not as strong as using a wedge anchor. So the strength of this is for lightweight, not heavyweight, materials. This here is another sleeve anchor. This here is a combo head. You have basically a Phillips or a flathead screwdriver you can drive this in and this is basically countersunk so if you have a piece of wood that you're fastening something to a concrete surface this will be flat on the surface versus having a sleeve anchor with a nut on the top protruding on the top of the wood or metal or whatever you are fastening. And the last one that I have here is what we call a wedge anchor. This is also a very highly used anchor out there. Basically you drill a hole in the concrete to the circumference of the wedge anchor. If it's 1/4" inch you drill a 1/4" inch hole, if it's 3/8" you drill a 3/8" hole. How this works is when you drill the hole in the concrete and you lock down on this nut, it starts to pull up this wedge here, that goes around the bottom diameter, starts to wedge in to this end, and then it tightens up and it doesn't pull out. This is the strongest concrete anchor to be used. As far as pullout goes and that's our demonstration of wedge anchors, different hollow wall anchors for masonry product. |
What are Lag Shield Anchors? |
Lag Shield Anchors TranscriptScroll Down To Continue Reading Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners - Fasteners 101. I'm Bob, today I'm going to talk about installing a lag screw in concrete with a lag shield. So let's get started. So I have here a lag shield which is made for concrete. We've gotten many requests about how to install a lag screw into concrete. So it's pretty simple you would have to have a lag shield. In this case, this is a 3/8" lag bolt or lag screw and here is a lag shield, which is made for concrete. For the lag shield, you would drill a hole the size of the diameter of the lag shield. In this case for a 3/8" and if you're using a lag shield for 3/8" so it would be 5/8" outside diameter. You would drill a hole in the concrete for the length of, 5/8" (diameter) by the length of the lag shield and just a little bit more than that and then you would hammer in the lag shield into the concrete. How this works is you'll see I'll take this apart. It's two pieces that comes apart. OK, there are these two clips on here that go into the top area here. I'm gonna put it back together and I put it back together and then after you put it in the concrete and you put the lag screw in, you'll start to see, once you start to screw it in, you'll see the bottom part start to spread. That's how it locks into the concrete. If you're taking a 2x4 or a piece of plywood or whatever you're fastening to the concrete, that's the product you would use for doing that. This lag shield, when you put it into concrete, the top of it should be flush with the top of the concrete. So you'll take a hammer, you'll hammer it into place, and that'll finish off at the top of the concrete and then if you're having a piece of 2x4 and Plus whatever length you want to go into the lag shield, so for instance if you had a 2x4 it would be an inch and a half plus the amount of area you're going to screw into the lag shield shield which would be about another inch to inch and a half so you use a three inch lag screw and you would just fasten it down. Torque it down and it would stay perfect in there forever depending on your environment that you're installing this in. These are zinc products. There are lag shields that are available in stainless also for high corrosion areas and you can find those on our website Thanks for watching. |
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