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Hand nailing 16d sinkers beats my framing nailer on old fir, and I'm not going back | Carpenters - Topic Shares

Hand nailing 16d sinkers beats my framing nailer on old fir, and I'm not going back

Last month I framed a 12x16 shed out of reclaimed douglas fir from a barn tear down in McMinnville and my Paslode kept jamming and blowing out the grain. I grabbed my 22 ounce Estwing and a box of 16d sinkers just to finish the wall, and the nails drove clean with way less splitting. The gun was sinking heads too deep and crushing the wood fibers, but hand nailing let me feel the set and pull back when the grain got tight. It took about 40 percent longer, sure, but I only split two boards the whole afternoon versus a dozen with the nailer. Anybody else switching back to a hammer on old growth, or am I just getting stubborn in my old age?

2 comments

2 Comments

kim.emma10d ago

Get where you're coming from but I gotta disagree on the splitting part. I've run thousands of 16ds through old fir with my framing gun and the trick is turning the pressure down to like 80 psi and bump firing instead of full trigger pulls. Sinking heads too deep is a gun setting problem, not a gun problem, and you can fix that in ten seconds with the depth dial. Hand nailing definitely gives you more feel for the grain, I won't argue that, but blaming the tool for blowing out boards when it's just dialed too hot seems like the wrong lesson.

jade27110d ago

Pulled a whole wall of old lath and plaster down last spring and ran into the same thing, but it was my finish gun chewing up the wood behind it. Those old studs were so dry and hard that the nails just bounced or bent sideways, and the gun kept denting the faces. I ended up going back to a plain old hammer and some 8d nails just to get the trim boards back up straight. Took me most of a Saturday when the gun would have done it in an hour, but nothing split and nothing popped loose later. My neighbor watched me cuss at that nailer for twenty minutes and then just handed me his hammer without a word. Sometimes the old tools just know the old wood better than we do.

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