Hanging a Cloud Absorber - WARNING!

Sorry to hear about your accident, that's too bad:(. I don't like to use drywall anchors but I do use them now and then for lightweight stuff on walls. For heavier stuff, especially on the ceiling, I try to find a joist to screw into. I know it's usually not exactly where you want it to be so you'd have to get creative with the hanging points on your cloud.

Toggle bolts of course should be fine, especially since you already have your holes located. Good luck and be safe!

Cheers,
Rock

This is pretty ironic.

Many (most) people go looking for joists when they are hanging things.

Once you find one, just run an appropriately sized wood screw or screw eye into it!

All the stuff for hanging items on drywall is for those *unusual* cases where you can't find a nearby stud.

BTW no matter what your preferences in this matter are, there's a standard tool called a "Stud finder" that is actually a metal detector that presumes that where you find nails and screws, you'll find a stud.

It had to happen.

Interesting. Helpful. People sometimes ask me "How do you know all that $#!* ?  It is updates via information like this that stimulates me to do some research, update what I know, and move on.

It had to happen.

I literally grew up in the 60s as an electronics tech fixing radars for the Army.  My radars were the extra-crispy CW Doppler kind that were in their way among the most complex piles of electronic gear around, after computers.  Just before I got drafted, I was fixing mainframes for IBM so by the time I was in  my early 20s, I'd been both places, hands on and up to my shoulders in the works.  

I was thinking the other day that while most people don't think deep thoughts about it, a GPS receiver is composed of at least a half dozen highly sensitive, highly precise microwave radio receivers in chips so small that even my watch has one of these chips, let alone the ones in relatively large devices like my phone and tablet.

In those days, a (1) microwave receiver or radar receiver was a like 19" wide, 6 foot high rack cabinet full of tubes. My primary radar in the Army had over 400 tubes, and therefore it dropped dead about once a day. I kept ahead of it with a regular semi-trailer full of replacement parts,  a screwdriver and my wits. Now a half dozen of them and an antenna are in a regular man's watch case. Most of the watch is a computer that outperforms the room-sized mainframes that I worked on before the Army.

It turns out that the density-based stud finders are arrays of microwave receiver/transmitters with a computer to analyze the signal that gets bounced back, and a display. 

It had to happen.

The trick with using the density type is NOT to calibrate it on or too near to a stud. The "calibration" procedure is simply holding the stud finder flat on the wall, pressing the button and waiting a couple seconds until the indicator lights go off. Then, to find the stud, slide the unit across the wall. When the leds start to turn on slow down and when they are all on, you've found the edge of the stud. Mark it with a pencil. Keep moving and when the lights start to go off, back it up until all on and pencil mark again. The distance between the marks will probably be about 1 1/2 inch, the width of the stud. Do this again up about 1 or 2 feet and below 1 or 2 feet to verify you are actually on a stud.

If you did not calibrate correctly, either the lights won't come on or will come on randomly. Try to calibrate in another spot.

Studs are usually 16" on center so once you find one, it's easy to verify by measuring 16" and testing again.

Oh, and then there's the old "knock on the wall trick"; when you hit a "dead" spot, you've found a stud.

Cheers,
Rock