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Whether you’re a professional flooring installer or a weekend do-it-yourself warrior with a load of hardwood flooring staring at you, this nailer is far and away one of the best ways to get the job done. Yes, it’s spendy, especially if you’re a homeowner just planning to do a couple of rooms. But if you weigh the cost of a professional installation, you come out miles ahead doing it yourself, even with this purchase, and you can work at your own pace instead of rushing a rental back to the store. If price is an obstacle, you might consider a manual nailer; you’ll pay about half as much, but you’ll do more than twice the work! Professionals love this model, and for good reason. It’s made of aircraft-grade aluminum, so it’s light and strong. Your compressor needs to run between 60 and 100 psi, but best performance came in between 70 and 90 psi. There’s practically no learning curve, so with just a light tap of the mallet, you’ll be cruising along your flooring with 420 inch-pounds of nailing pressure. The base plates – one is for half-inch planks, the other, ¾-inch -- are nice and wide, giving you rock-solid stability, and the magazine holds 110 fasteners, keeping reloading of your 1-1/2- to 2-inch cleats to a minimum. We like the long-reach handle, but a shorter version is available, too. If you’re putting down hardwood or engineered flooring, you’d be doing yourself a favor by picking up this nailer. -- Kris Jensen-Van Heste What’s in the Box
Nailer, graphite mallet, pre-finished flooring adapter foot |
We bought this nailer to install 1800sqft of hardwoods in our house. Here's our experience:
Pros:
Beefy. You can tell it's made for the pros. And you can smack it hard to help get warped boards tight.
It does exactly what it's supposed to.
The included mallet feels like high quality, and its just the right weight.
Cons:
We had a lot of problems with the nailer allowing the last nail in a stack to fall out of the nailer. This is a problem because it can fall half way out, then when you put the nailer down on the finished floor, it's easy for the sharp nail to scratch the finish. Get in the habit of setting the nailer on the unfinished part of the floor.
The nailer includes a plastic shoe that bolts to the underside. The instructions say this is for finished floors whereas the normal plate is for unfinished (site finished) floors. The shoe was useless for us. It made it nearly impossible to line up the nailer with the tongue. The normal plate didn't scratch the floor at all. So we used it that way. Maybe softer woods would have scratched (we used distressed oak).
Having to attach the handle was annoying. It also seems like a clunky afterthought. But once installed, it worked fine.
If you don't smack it with a hammer hard enough, it won't drive the nail in all the way in. If it's half way out, you can use channel lock pliers to pry the nail out. But if you get it 90% of the way in, you'll have to use a nail set to drive the nail in the rest of the way so that the next board fits. This is a real pain. The nail metal is soft. It likes to deform or break off. This is more operator error than anything else. So smack it hard.
How it could be better:
Stop letting the last nail fall out.
Make the nail cartridge slightly longer so you can put the next stack of nails in sooner.
Redesign the handle.
What we learned:
For wood floors, wider is better. 5" wide boards mean half the cutting, fitting, and nailing compared to 2.5" wide boards.
Also pick up a finish nailer to help when you're close to walls. If you take the rubber guard off, a finish nailer can nail through the tongue just like this nailer. Less face nailing.
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