Hi! I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. Every spring, late spring, after all the seeds and stuff have come down, you get up here and you clean out your gutter—I hope. But every year, you have to get out that hammer and you have to drive in these loose gutter spikes that come out. It seems the same ones every year. There’s a simple solution for that. Let’s get to work.
Your typical aluminum gutter anchor consists of an aluminum sleeve and a straight gutter spike. It does have some small grooves in it, but for the most part, it’s smooth. Now, what I’m suggesting you do is you go to the hardware store and you buy a—this has a plastic sleeve and it’s a screw in gutter spike. These threads are oversized so as to grip into the wood where the gutter spike had already punctured a hole. If you’ve ever try to pull a screw out of wood, you know that pulling a screw out of wood versus pulling a nail out of a wood, you got a lot more gripping power with screw heads. Let me show you how to do it.
Now, what you need to do is this screw threaded gutter anchor, it came with a square drive bit on the top, so you need to get the right type of bit for the screw itself. What I do is I get it started into the gutter like that. And then either you can take the plastic sleeves that they provide you with or you can take the old aluminum gutter sleeve that the original one came on, you can slide it over top of that, slip it into the gutter. The nice thing about these is you can go right into the exact same hole as where it came out of because the end of this screw is just a little bit more oversized than the hole. Simply line it up, route it in place, snug her up. Now you don’t want to over tighten it because you’ll flex the gutter in too far and it will look like you got a dink in your gutter. So, that should be it. Next year when it comes on to replace some of these, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the one that you’re going to have to replace.
So there you go, the screw in gutter spike. Doesn’t make cleaning out your gutters any easier and it doesn’t make a—but at least maybe it’s something you won’t have to do again next year.
I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you like this tip, please subscribe. If not, please check out our home channel. We have many other maintenance and building ideas there. Thanks.
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