How to drill into a secret room you suspect lies in the voids of your pre-war home

[Medievalist]

@Papasan

Use one of these, sparingly. [sledgehammers pic]

That actually works surprisingly well on drywall. Not on plaster like Rob has, though; speaking from sad experience. Do Not Attempt!

@d_r

I paid under $20 for my endoscope. It is also useful for looking for stuff that fell behind the dresser, for inspecting things under the hood of my car, and for admiring my ear hair.

I got mine for free. It is worth every penny it cost me! I have had zero success using it for anything, although my buddy Pedro says it works for him for inspecting rifle barrels. Basically mine was designed to look at the inside of a pipe, and has failed totally at inspecting stud cavities and similar voids. It just can’t focus on anything wide or distant, everything’s a blur.

@Ratel

Man, I want a good fibre optic camera or “lens” for investigating burrows. Anyone got a recommendation?

I recommend a cheap cell phone on a whippy stick.

@subextraordinaire

Is that…fortran?

@piratejenny and @ambiguity are right, it’s BASIC. FORTRAN line numbers are in columns 2-5 and statements start in column 7. Oh Jeebus I am old.

@dave_b

Ballista? It’s a ballista, right?

The following video is like an episode of my life. Differences are that my teenage ballista used hemp rope soaked in neatsfoot oil, fired tennis balls and we had it set up in the middle of a suburban street. But I don’t actually know what ever happened to the old thing :(.

my Roman Scorpion/ Ballista

@AcerPlatanoides

The upside of this approach is that you can make a clean plug for the hole using the same hole saw and some fresh new drywall.

Very good point! If you use a multi-blade adjustable hole saw like this one…

…(which are very cheap, in both senses of the word) you can make a larger hole in the plaster, and a slightly smaller one in the lath, and it’ll be ridiculously easy to patch since you won’t have to do anything clever to prop up the disk of drywall. Nice!

@fuzzyfungus

A decent fiber endoscope is nontrivial hardware and rather pricey; but the proliferation of cheap and tiny camera optics has created a category of what are effectively webcams on atypically long cables. Requires you to have a host device; but it has gotten to the point where it is cheaper to put a decent camera on the end of the probe and run power and a serial bus than it is to bundle enough optical fibers to get decent resolution.

Exactly. All the professionals I know are using their cell phones instead of endoscopes, bore scopes, periscopes, &etc. In a drywall type situation, they’ll pull out a replaceable-blade pocketknife and cut a hole big enough to stick their arm through with the cell phone, they don’t even go to the truck for tools. In a trickier situation (like 3-coat plaster on lath, for example ) they’ll use a cheap OTG USB camera with an LED ring. Since nearly all my computer equipment comes from dumpsters, and I don’t own a cell phone, it’s a little different for me (laptop with logitech “eyeball” camera) but basically the idea is cheap, easily replaceable general purpose tool instead of a durable, reliable, limited use specialty tool.

@Nonentity

I’ve been trying to work out how to run some cabling through the walls of this place for a while,

Steel fish tape and a hole saw set. The learning curve is pretty harsh, but the results are well worth it in my opinion.

@funruly

Kickstarter to send Medievalist to Chateau Beschizza.

I think we’re on opposite coasts of the USA, so that would probably not be cheap!

@GilbertWham

It’s all very well putting @Medievalist on the front page and all,

I hadn’t even thought about that <blush> but now I’m flattered. I’d like to thank Rob, the Academy, and of course The Crawling Chaos.