Metal coat hangers! They make much smaller holes and all you need to repair is a small amount of mud. Plus I always have a lot of them from dry cleaning.

I cut off the long bottom part of the hanger. Push it up into the ceiling to make sure you have enough depth. Then figure out the radius of your speaker and bend it at that length. Put the hanger in the ceiling and spin it around to make sure it free of studs or pipes.


I will also use the hanger to find walls that we need to fish up into by cutting one end straight and the other end at a 45 degree angle. That 45 degree angle actually make a drill bit. Then you can use that to drill down into carpeting or hardwood floors. When you go into the basement you can see where the hanger is and where you need to drill up. I only use this when I'm not sure where to drill after much investigation. Also it does leave a small hole in the hardwood floor so you have to weigh out how important this trick is. You can use a wood filler pencil to cover up the hole. I've even taken a putty knife and pulled the quarter round back and drilled between that and the baseboard.

Just be careful not to apply to much pressure to the coat hanger as it is very flexible and it can bend pretty easily. Once it's bent throw it and move on to the next one.

A stud finder is the first thing you need..obviously! You can use a simple medal hanger. Make a hole in the center of your speaker location. bend the hanger and put in the the center hole and spin it. If it clears your good to go.

Just a little trick an old installer showed me when I was starting in CI.

Everyone has their own ideas on how to cut in speakers. just do what works for you.

We make a point of using speaker brackets if we are doing the prewire. With alot of soundbar/resilient channeling being used now for ceilings it saves alot of the guess work and forces the drywallers to cut our holes out (95% of the time). It costs a bit extra for brackets but it saves you time on the trim out and allows you to line your speaker locations up alot more accurately....

If it is a prewire done by someone else or a retrofit, a studfinder and the speaker template does the trick.

Just remember folks, when cutting in speakers, and penciling up walls..

Crayon marks cannot be made the same width from one end to the other, as the crayon wears down. Those are pencil or pen.

I don't find ANY studfinders to be reliable. Once I was setting up two inwalls and the studfinder went nuts over the entire left channel area. Part of the wall was drywall, part plaster with metal mesh; stud spacing was uneven. The small hole and tape measure saved the day, defined the left opening possibility, which let me work out a matching right (where I had all sorts of play).

I adopted the habit of using a tape measure after running electrician's fishtape in, dragging it out, measuring the tape, occasionally dropping it and having to redo, and this all over and over. The tape already has the inches on it.

The wall cleaning methods are GOLD. Thank you so much!

speaker brackets are the way to go 100% when you can.
every pre wire we do we use them..

also allows client to not complain later on about placement,
as they can see speaker brackets before the sheetrock goes up.

You think he might have tried a battery drill for that one? At least he wore his safety goggles :).

He really needs to bring a towel.

What for?

Holy moly

Whew.. power strip looks European.. for a second there i thought we (US) were responsible for that.

I thought this might be staged until I counted the tenth beer bottle ...

I call 'em stud liars. I rarely use one and I NEVER trust it.

OMFG!

And I thought Bangkok was the home of the power loonies...