Popular Mechanics: Home Improvement

Using Hydraulic Cement for a Fast Fix

By Roy Berendsohn

An unfinished basement is a great rough-and-ready storage area, with just one problem: There’s concrete or concrete block just about everywhere you look, and this makes it difficult to quickly install hardware for hanging shelves and related projects. A quick fix for light-to medium-duty hanging is to bore an oversize hole, then fix a standard eye bolt in the hole using hydraulic cement. The method is strong enough that other types of fasteners or hardware can be attached and combined with shelving, for example.

The folks at UGL happened to have some step-by-step photography illustrating this, and they were good enough to send the shots along for us to use here. The product shown is UGL Drylok Fast Plug, a rapid-setting hydraulic cement. It comes as a powder that, when mixed with water, forms a mortarlike material that sets in 3 to 5 minutes. The 3-pound can shown costs about $4.30 at hardware stores and home centers. Its primary use is for patching cracks and holes in foundations, but it works well for anchoring fasteners in masonry.

  Go to Work

Begin by boring a hole in the masonry using a hammer drill (Photo 1). Clear dust and debris from the hole, and wet it thoroughly. Let the water soak into the surrounding masonry.

Next, while holding the fastener in the hole, use a brick trowel and firmly push the anchoring cement around the fastener (Photo 2). The cement reaches its full compressive strength of 1,987 psi in 28 days, but even after a week it achieves a strength of 920 psi. Granted, the loads applied in this case are in shear, but the high compressive strength serves as a rough indicator of how difficult it would be to dislodge the fastener once the cement has reached its full strength.

Two applications are shown for the anchored fastener: as a hanger and as an anchoring point for a clothes line (Photo 3 and 4).

For more information, contact UGL, P.O. Box 70, Scranton, PA 18501; 800-272-3235.

Step-by-Step Illustrations

1) Bore a hole in the masonry using a hammer drill. 2) Use a brick trowel and firmly push the anchoring cement around the fastener. 3) One of applications is a hanger. 4) It can be also used as an anchoring point for a clothes line.

Copyright © Popular Mechanics 2001. Reprinted by permission

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