How To Anchor Wood Wall Plates To Concrete

Bob Schmidt shows you how to anchor wood wall plates to concrete during your basement remodeling renovation project.

Hi I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. So you decided you’re going to go ahead and frame those basement walls in or put those walls down on to that concrete surface and it comes time that you need to anchor that tree to be plated down to the concrete. There’s a quick simple way of doing that, I’ll show you how to do it. Let’s get to work. What this called is a split drive concrete anchor. I like to use 3 inches long for anchoring 2x4’s down the concrete. What it has are these little flutes that are pre-made into it and this nail is horned so that when this drives into that concrete, it just compresses it like no other. It wants hold its form and it holds awesome. Whenever working with hardened nail, they don’t have the tendency to bend, they have more of a tendency to break off and split, shoot off like a little bullet. Always make sure you wear eye protection. You’re also going to be using a hammer drill; it has a tendency to be loud, so also going to make sure you protect your ears. You’ll need a framing hammer and just a simple drill with a quarter inch wood bit. Once you have your line down, where you know where you’re going to want that wall to go, I like putting this anchors about every two foot on center roughly, except for obviously in the doorway openings if you’re going to cut that plate out later. I take my quarter inch bit, it someway towards the center of the hole or the center of the wall plate, I like to drill that whole with a quarter inch bit first. Once you have your quarter inch holes drilled with your wood bit through your wood plate, make sure that you put on your eye and your ear protection. What I like to do is take a hammer drill with a concrete bit or a 3 inch split drive. I always like to drill my hole a half inch deeper than my split drive, that way if there’s any dust or debris in the hole there’s still has plenty rooms so it doesn’t bottom out before it hits the top. So I put this piece of tape on here as a stop. Now you take this quarter inch hole here where you drill with a wood bit. You make sure you move this over to the line, make sure it’s exactly where you want and you drill right through the plate into the concrete until you get down to that tape. Now once I’m sure I’m down to that tape I like to plunge the bit in and out to try to clear out some of the dusts out of the hole. When I go ahead and I wipe that excess dust away so that it’s not clogging up the hole later on. Simply tap your split driver into the whole, get it down through the plate and you can feel when it hits the concrete. It’ll line itself right back up with where it was. Get your hand out of the way; make sure your eye protection is on. And go ahead and drive that split drive down. Now if you drive that split drive down to as just a little bit below the surface, let’s say when you come through here and you put your wall studs in, unlike other anchors you can put wall stud up right over top of that split drive and it’s not going to be on the way. Just to show you an example on how well this hole, make sure you put this on line and in the right place before you drive them in. I’m going to go ahead and try to pull this plate up, say I made a mistake, drive in to that plate with my ripping bar lift it up, and as you can see the plate may give up but the anchor doesn’t. Now if I put a pry bar on this or whatever and try to pull this up, I’ll probably be going blow out a big chunk of concrete. So to make sure that have that happen, again wearing your safety glasses, safety protection, tap the split drive side to side like this, and because it’s a hard nail, it will have a tendency to want to break versus bend. So after you tap it side a side a few times, it will break off. So there you go. The split drive, pretty much a way of assuring that wall plate stays anchor down to that concrete exactly the way you want it. I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you like this tip please subscribe, if not, check out our home channel, we have many other videos there. Thanks.