The Screw It team have a background in property development and leasing which has led them to use all manner of drywall fixings, and with varying success - quite simply few drywall fixings performed as advertised. It was time to take an engineer’s approach to the problem!

The strength of a drywall fixing is derived from its surface area in the plane of the wall, its ability to maintain shape and the structural integrity of the wall. Fixings that are screwed into the wall are weak as they present little surface area and disrupt the integrity of the wall. Fixings that are pushed through the wall and have any degree of flex, are by nature weak as the flex affects the ability of the installed fixing to maintain shape and upon loading they create high pressure areas that lead to the failure of the drywall. Fixings that have wings that rotate around around a shaft are also weak as they contain many moving parts which in order to move have to have some play in the system. As a consequence they place a high load on the edge of the hole which leads to failure (at much lower loads than advertised).

Screw It Fixings use Additive Deposit Manufacturing techniques to make a fixing that is not possible to make via traditional methods. The fixings eliminate flex by using the stiffest possible material and the least number of moving parts, while eliminating any possible source of flex in the highest loaded areas. Every part of every fixing has been considered in sub millimeter detail, and tested exhaustively - for instance the clamp is designed to be as thin as possible, but has been tested so that a muscly 100kg builder turning a screwdriver cannot strip a thread!

All the fittings are tested in the real world:

1) Holes drilled using standard equipment

2) Real world weights and brackets used for testing so that fittings have an element of shock loading, loading and reloading built into their safe load rating, like attaching a cabinet or loading up a shelf in the real worlds. Some competitors state fantastically high load ratings which are achieved using strain gauges where the fitting is loaded up very gradually - this is not a real world scenario!