How To Find Wall Studs In A Food Truck

When mounting heavier accessories or appliances in your food truck, you’ll probably want to drill directly into the wall studs. But how do you find wall studs in a food truck?

Unlike in residential construction, the location of studs inside your food truck may not follow a set pattern. Before you start drilling holes blindly, here are some tips you can use to shorten your search.

Locating Wall Studs In A Food Truck Can Be Tricky

Building codes for residential construction make a carpenter’s job to find wall studs a simple process. The same cannot be said for food trucks. Your food truck may have been fit out with wood or metal studs, and often aren’t placed in standard intervals.

Use these tips to find wall studs in your food truck:

Look for the rivets that attach the interior wall covering to the studs
Use a magnetic or electronic stud finder. These are fairly inexpensive and can be used to find both wooden and metal studs
Get a framing plan directly from the food truck builder. These plans should include all of the locations and sizes of the wall studs.
Push gently on wall paneling with your hands (8″ to 10″ apart) to see where the panel bends.

A few other important points:

It’s worth noting that studs inside a food truck are usually spaced irregularly, and sometimes up to 24″ to 36″ apart. They’re not like those found in residential construction which are on 16″ centers.
There may be sections of plywood added in between the studs to reinforce certain areas in your food truck’s walls. These plywood sections may throw off your stud finder with a ‘false positive’.
Use rivets to attach things to metal studs (instead of screws). The metal studs may be too thin to allow the threads on metal screws to grip correctly.
Use a small drill bit when first drilling into the stud’s probable location. That way if you mess up, you won’t have a huge hole in your wall in need of patching.

The Bottom Line

Contact your food truck’s manufacturer to obtain the structural drawings for your model, if possible. While this won’t guarantee changes weren’t made during construction but you’ll have a much better idea where to find wall studs in your food truck’s walls.

Have you had to find wall studs in your food truck? How did you find them? Did you use one of these tips or did you use something we didn’t include? Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Twitter | Facebook

By Richard Myrick|2020-07-23T08:16:58-04:00Jul 23, 2020|Under the Hood|

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].