www.protoolreviews.com: Cordless framing nailers have come a long way, but there’s still a noticeable difference between the best battery-powered options and the speed and feel of a pneumatic nailer. Metabo HPT takes a different approach with its NR1890DRBQRY (memorize it—there’s a quiz later), using its improved drive system to bring a familiar pneumatic-like experience to an 18V platform. That said, we want to know how the Air Spring Drive + System performs in real life.
3 comments:
This seems like a pretty good product, all and all. To me, the biggest benefit highlighted in the article is the lower weight, particularly because theater often means hauling around a number of different tools. In a wider sense, having cordless, electric nailing options seems almost critical to me in theater---sure, you can use pnumatic tools, and there are times when you simply need the power of a pneumatic tool and don't want to spent bucketloads of money on the electric version that you will rarely use But I would argue that is not going to be the case with nailers. We end up using them a fair bit in theater, and whether in a shop or on stage, making repairs or additions, the nailer is so much more convenient and less of a giant pain to set up if it is battery powered. That is why, in a more general sense, I think theater will probably continue moving towards battery powered tools: we are not like many other industries, where days on end are spent with one tool; no we switch constantly between tools, and having to deal with air hoses and compressors just makes that hard.
I’ve only used a framing nailer a handful of times, and never in the context of scenery or theatre. I suppose I never really questioned why we don't use framing nailers, but narrow crowns work great for framing hollywood flats, nails are probably too wide and would split the 1x, and medium crowns for theatrical flats, because trying to nail through the long edge of 1x sounds like a recipe for an ER visit. As soon as you get to the thicker materials that nails could make sense glue and screws are the standard, where you could still use a nailer instead of screw and impact driver, but you lose the ability to unscrew it as easily, and the screws add a clamping force that creates better surface contact for the wood glue, thus a more efficient connection. All of this to say, while this nailer sounds fantastic for commercial construction, as it stands it would be a difficult thing to integrate into a typical theatre scene shop's work flow.Now in an ideal world, where I can just have an infinite amount of money to buy tools and space to store them, I would just have this tool for the odd case in which it could be useful because it certainly sounds like a wonderful option compared to its competitors!
I would be curious about if this technology would transfer to other tools more familiar to the scene shop, such as the aforementioned narrow or wide crown staplers. I have used cordless staplers a fair amount in situations where running an air hose is impractical, or for one off jobs where I just need to throw a couple extra staples in and grabbing one tool and a battery is just more convenient than running a whole hose, even just within the shop. That being said, I always grab it the tiniest bit begrudgingly, because of the lack of consistency in power I've experienced and they’re SO much heavier than a pneumatic counterpart, which makes them feel clunky and imprecise, so if there is a world in which the optimizations of this tool can be similarly reflected in cordless staplers, I am absolutely here for it!
Seeing pneumatic tools being phased out in ways like this makes me really curious and a bit concerned for their future in theatre, since were sucha small niche that the production of tools that we specifically need that we steal from other industries could lead to us having to pivot, and that being a major expense. THat being said it is really cool to the see the innovations brought by corporations to improve the lives of construction workers and it would be cool to see if they would swing thier sttneiton towards theatremakers and make stuff tgats more aimed at us such as a really lightwieght easy to use staple gun thats designed to do what the majority of theatre flats need to do instead of stealing techniques to fit the tool we have like stud walls for raked stages or the gussets and lap joints used in workung adapted to broadway flats.
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