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I live in a flat about 100 years old and the walls are some not-very-solid plastery stuff. I'm not sure what I need to use to hang heavy things on the wall. Ordinary rawlplugs seem to pull out a bit easy, and I'm not sure that there is a consistent cavity for using snap toggles and what not. Any ideas?
Expanding bolt?
You really need to use longer fixings and drill through the crap plaster into the brickwork behind. We have this problem in our house, Victorian plaster has the consistency of icing sugar.....
I use a short frame fixing:
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Ideally you need to find the old stud upright and work with that, maybe fitting a batten.
Old lath and plaster can be a git to fix to if it's gone all baggy.
Old houses can be so much fun for DIY. I was using an SDS hammer drill to chase out a socket in a bedroom. The bricks are rock hard and the mortar is like soft cheese, so rather than the drill chipping away at the brick, it just punched it right through the wall and sent it flying across the floor of the room behind. I ended up putting the brick in a vice, cutting the recess then mortaring it back into the internal wall!
As footfaps I use frame fixings / hammer fixings in older buildings, something long enough to get past the plaster and lath and reach something solid behind. Unlike regular rawlplugs the plastic bit goes through the thing you a fixing and into the wall, rather than just being pushed into the drilled hole. So in 40mphs pic the the plug would be in the wood and the wall, not just in the wall.
I use them for speed as much as anything - hold batten where you want it - drill though the batten and into the wall in one go - whack in the fixing.
Thanks - on an interior wall so not sure there's any bricks to be found? How do I find the stud - by knocking on the wall as though I'm looking for a secret passage?
Have problems here - 370 year old rubble constructed house. The plaster is quite crumbly combined with some of the stones used to build the place being too hard to drill makes hanging things great fun. Sometimes you get lucky and it's a drill-able stone, other times it's something like granite.
You can get stud detectors, often combined with mains wire detectors. Or just use a bradle and probe for one.