Nail gun

FirstDay Cottage doesn’t recommend using nail guns on their houses. But we’re getting on in years and are a little concerned about tennis elbow and other wear and tear from pounding thousands of nails. So we bought a Paslode CF325 nail gun as a supplemental tool. This is is a self-powered tool that doesn’t require an air compressor, which was a big advantage for us, since we (1) didn’t have electricity at the house site for a few weeks, and (2) didn’t want to have to rent a noisy compressor for many weeks and deal with air hoses.

After using the nail gun a bit during the beam fabrication, I have a better idea of its benefits and limitations. The upside is that it’s great for laminating the beams and posts quickly. But one big downside is that the nails are nearly impossible to remove them or drive further with a hammer if they are in the wrong place or hit something and don’t go in all the way. So we only use the gun after we’ve nailed a beam or post manually with a couple of conventional nails.

The other downside is that the teeth on the nose of the nail gun mar the surface of the wood. I’ve ordered a no-mar nose, but it hasn’t arrived and I don’t know how much it will help. In the meantime, we’ll only use the nail gun on surfaces that won’t be visible on a daily basis. So we used it on the outside of the first floor beams, whose nails are only visible in the basement, but we may not use it on the second floor beams.

We discovered a new problem a few days later: the nails I bought for the nail gun it weren’t galvanized, so when it rained, the exposed nail heads that got wet leaked black streaks onto the wood. This wasn’t actually a problem with the nail gun itself, but a mistake on my part in the ordering process.