With equal respect Dwight, I can assure you that there are still framing crews out there that choose hammers over nails guns whenever possible.
Nail guns have advantages doing a few repetitive tasks like sheathing. There great, I have lots of nail guns, staplers, etc...Hammers have many advantages too.
At the end of the day,
it is not the speed the nail enters a piece of wood that makes a significant difference in how much framing gets done. That is only one small part of it.
With my hammer only, I have personally embarrassed several whipper-snappers on my crew who thought they could get more done than me using their nail guns.
They don’t always get the depth set right and have to pull off the sheathing they ruined and replace it.
They blow out the end of lots of studs.
They commonly miss whole rows of joists, rafters, studs, because they don’t know if they hit anything or not.
I have been to houses framed with nail guns that I could have pushed over by hand. I have never been to a job using only hammers that was not good and tight.
By the time you compensate for all the studs you blew the end out of, the sheathing that had to be replaced because the nails were past flush (here the building department does not allowed us to use nail guns on brace panels for this very reason) and you have gone back over the work to tighten it up, compensated for the injuries, spent 30 min/day just bringing them out and putting them away, adjusting them, oiling them, there is not always any time savings at all.
If you could have only one or the other, you would have to choose the hammer.
I know several finish carpenters who would never use nail guns.
The same for several roofers I know.
Some Architects still specify that the shingles and other items be placed with
hammers only
. No nail guns. I don’t think that should surprise you.
It all depends on the job and the user.
It is not so different with Architects. There are still Architects using pencil and paper out there who at the end of the day can, and do, out produce CAD operators.
Automatic Dimensioning is a good example of how I am comparing the Cadimage wall framing tool to what can be done very easily with just ArchiCAD.
You can place automatic dimensions real, real fast, however, by the time you delete all the dimensions you did not want, move them around to better locations, change some of dimensions to be from a different starting point, clean it up to a reasonably good and useful chain of dimensions, you have probably found that it is rarely worth the effort.
It was probably not faster in the end than if you placed all of the dimensions individually as you go along.
Is the Cadimage wall framing tool faster and better than what we can already do with ArchiCAD?
As I said before, it depends on the user. I tried it and found that it was only marginally faster, if at all, and has a few downsides.
Everyone is welcome to try it out and see if it works for them or not.
I stand by my opinion about nail guns. My opinion is based on 28 years of building with hammers, and nail guns. I am the son of a carpenter, and both of my grandfathers were also carpenters. I know how to use a hammer, a nail gun, and ArchiCAD.
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