PB meets James Turnbull, inventor of Suregrips: a small but heavy duty plasterboard fixing.
Wall plugs. They come in all shapes and sizes and there’s one for every application you can think of. These variations can range from a simple piece of plastic to something decidedly more complicated with ‘arms’, ‘legs’, anchors and a multitude of moving parts. For the former, take drilling into a brick wall as an example, thing’s don’t get much easier than a nice bog-standard red plug!
Equally, fixing something to a plasterboard wall is a great example for when things can get decidedly more complicated. While it’s by no means a guarantee, the chances of something going wrong certainly increase and so ensues a careful dance between how strong you want your fixing to be and how much of a hole you want to make in the wall. There’s a vast array of options in the plasterboard fixing market that tend to offer one or the other. It’s either maximum strength (often with it a maximum sized hole in the wall) or something small and discreet that you’re not quite sure has even deployed right, or is actually going to hold the weight of the new shelf you’re putting up.
Someone who knows about this all too well is James Turnbull. Working as a carpenter, James is certainly experienced in using fixings and, a few years ago, decided to do something about a gap he saw in the plasterboard fixings market. James was kind enough to invite the PB team to his HQ to get up close and personal with his invention and solution to fixing to plasterboard – Suregrips.
“I’ve been a carpenter for 20 years and one of the problems that I really found was there’s a number of fixings on the market, and while the larger ones are fine for strong fixings, when you’ve got smaller brackets, these larger fixings are visible around the perimeter. They’re great fixings and I use them myself, but they’re also expensive at about £1 a fixing. When you’re using 20 or 30 a day, it’s a super expensive way of putting things on wall that can come out of your wages.” James explains.
“There’s a complexity with these larger fixings too. They’re quite an intricate thing, you have to drill a hole using an undercutting tool on some of them and try and get things to move around the back of the wall. So, the idea was to come up with something that was super small, simple, fast and cheap that would get you a strong fixing. Most small plasterboard fixings tend to rely on deforming themselves and pulling back against the other side of the wall to hold your screw. These fixings can then either break, or not engage correctly, and you’re unable to tell if they’ve even worked correctly.”
Suregrips, James’ answer to these problems, is a UK manufactured, PCT patented 10mm fixing which he designed using his CAD skills from his carpentry business. The fixing is suitable for any 4.0mm or 4.5mm gauge woodscrew, (which will handily fit most brackets you’d put up) working like a cantilever. Keeping it easy breezy, James has opted for simple physics to be the basis of the plug’s strength. And strong it is! While there’s no official max load limit yet, James has a number of videos across his social media accounts showing just how strong Suregrips are. In one, he loads up a bookshelf with 98kg in dumbbells borrowed from his neighbours before it came down. This isn’t the end either, with larger variations of the fixing coming soon in the future!
Getting that kind of strength with the size of a smaller plug seems like a bit of a revelation for the industry. Because Suregrips can be installed in any orientation too, there’s nothing stopping you from putting a number in close proximity to each other when required, something that isn’t possible with the larger circular fixings that take up more valuable wall space. Not having any garish bits of plastic poking out round the sides of a bracket is a bonus too, providing a nice clean finish to any installation.
With Suregrips, James has kept things simple using his real-world experience. Suregrips works as a smaller fixing with the power of a larger one that you can rely on every time. James attests himself that if he uses a plug and it fails, he won’t be trying it again. Sometimes, it’s best to keep things simple.
For more information on Suregrips visit Suregrips | Plasterboard Fixing Anchor. Hollow wall anchor.
