Trevanion":3icney9l said:
You really can't get cheaper or more eco-friendly than a hammer and a bag of nails, wouldn't take much longer once you get a good hammer arm. Nothing to go wrong either so long as your hammer handle doesn't shrink and the head flies off :shock:
I built a couple of timber frame buildings* entirely with a wooden handled hammer, and yes, hammering in 4 inch nails was quick and efficient. However, the principle difference between hammering and a nail gun is in aligning the two pieces of wood you are attempting to join. With a hammer, each blow of the hammer on a nail in the plate bounces the stud away from its location. Everything moves, because the plate also moves around as you hit the nail. Yes, you get used to this, and compensate for it, but it's a nuisance. With a nail gun, you line the two pieces of wood up and pull the trigger, and they stay precisely where they were put. That is the one thing that makes a nail gun worth having. The fact is, you still need a hammer anyway, to drive home those nails which the nail gun left up because they hit a knot or a denser grain or a wetter piece of wood, or just because the damn machine keeps moving out of adjustment......but the nail gun sticks the two bits of wood together
in the position you want much better than hammering by hand does, and that really is worth the faffing around that goes with the territory.
*One of the them was a large house with double stud outer walls (ie two walls, one inside the other), so massive amounts of nailing. Oh, and lots of sawing. All done with a handsaw.