"Studio Grade" stud finder.

[The Scum]

Shut yer trap, VVV

I'm fighting my way through trim carpentry on the new rooms. The hassle is that it's very hard to find studs when there are 2 and 3 layers of 5/8" drywall.

I've been using a basic B&D model, and a somewhat fancier Zircon with a metal stud mode, and a deep-scan option. The B&D is basically useless, the Zircon can mostly find things, but it's not super accurate...sloppy enough to have the occasional frustrating "oops."

These are 16 ga steel studs, so a ferrous metal detector of some sort might be useful...I see increasingly high-tech gizmos...there's an $80 Bosch that claims to find metal up to 4" deep...then a step up to some serious professional looking stuff that's probably using actual radar...

Does anyone have wisdom to impart here?

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Plaster and paint and fixing all the oppses has always been the cheapest option for me. Installed a banister last summer and had about 5 oppses for every one of the 6 screws I needed to hit a stud. Frustrating but the patch and paint was quick.

[vvv]

Foiled again!

FWIW, I've had good luck using a lamp.

Darken the room, look at the wall at an angle with a light shining on it.

Especially on older walls, you can often see the stud distorting the wall, filled nail holes, etc.

[Krackle]

light can work..take a flood light and get it very close to the wall so it's raking low across the wall..look for abberations in the surface
that are repetitive..mudded screw mounds and such..

Do you know how the studs were layed out in terms of what the centers were? 16 inch centers?..you can take an area where you're installing trim and tap a long nail into the wall to find a stud..then zone in on finding the left and right edge of that stud..then mark the center..if you're on 16 inch centers, you should be able to tape off 16 inches from the center you found using the nail..and you'll end up close to the center of the next stud..every few studs or so tap the nail in to test that you're close..it sucks but hopefully the studs were
installed proper and all..if you want to spend 250 dollars there are some expensive studfinders out there..Bosch makes one..still not a perfect science tho.

[Colorblind]

Could you source a magnet that would be strong enough to find the studs and/or screws?

[vvv]

Hmmm.

Liquor is quicker.

[The Scum]

So I got the Bosch. $75 at McGuckin hardware.

Initial experiments tell me that it's more repeatable than the zircon.

I'll really put it through it's paces doing baseboards on Saturday and report back.

[crow]

I have a Franklin Sensors FS710PROProSensor 710+ that works pretty well (~80% accurate).

I almost never use it because I acquired a pack of roughly dime-sized ring magnets (I think at Lowe's) and stuck three of them together on the end of a string. I just hold the string against the wall and swing it across the surface of the wall until the magnets find a screw in the wall. I don't think it has ever let me down.

[The Scum]

So, after a day of using the Bosch, I think it's a keeper.

Once I got the hang of it, it's very accurate. Under 3 layers of 5/8", it was reporting the studs as being about 1" wide, under 2 layers, its more like 1/2".

Only a couple oopses, mostly in corners where it couldn't get a solid read.

The trick is to let it calibrate itself when you pick it up. Turn it on, run it along the wall until it has seen areas both with and without studs. It'll flash like it found something, then the LED goes from red to yellow, and it's ready to hunt. It has 2 tiers of signal indicators, to help you move the right direction, and a pretty strong "center" indicator that turns on when it's got a solid read. I was typically getting it calibrated, then hinting back & forth a couple times, marking the onset of the stud from each direction, repeating for confidence, then using the center of those marks.

It's also got a hole through the unit at the middle of the sensor, so you can stick a pencil/pen through it to mark. It also lets you know that the "actvce region" of the sensor is a cone extending below the hole - no guessing where in relation to the device it's actually detecting.

Was drilling countersunk pilot holes on the baseboards, sinking Simpson self-drilling 3.5" screws to hold the boards down.

Did about 175 linear feet of baseboard in a day.