Staples

My right wrist is throbbing.  I’ve iced it twice today and it’s still throbbing.  And I have blisters on my hand.  I’m sure there are all kinds of bad jokes running through your heads, but it’s entirely related to boat building, I assure you.  Yesterday we started the planking process using a staple gun similar to the one you probably have in your tool drawer.  These take a fair bit of pressure to pull and after 1000 staples (not kidding, there were about 250 left in a box of 1250 we bought that morning) my hand was killing me.  So we went to Home Depot and bought a $100 pneumatic stapler.  The only option they had was a narrow crown construction stapler. These are wonderful tools, and my wrist began smiling as I drove staple after staple with the mere pull of a trigger.  Unfortunately, however, the smile turned upside down today when it came time to remove them.  As this is a construction stapler, it drives those buggers deep.  Even at its lightest setting they’re fully bedded in the wood.  And there’s not much of a head to pull on to remove them.  Yes, we’re driving them through strips to facilitate their removal, but it’s still a nightmare getting them out.

Screaming wrist and blistered hand notwithstanding, the staples are out of the starboard side of the boat, and it’s really starting to look like a boat!  Yay!

We’ve also done about 75% of the first layer of the port side planking.  We would have finished but my dad needed to drive back to Palo Alto and the BART strike makes afternoon traffic a nightmare.  He wanted to leave early to try to beat the chaos.

The staples you’re looking at above (driven through the green strips to facilitate removal) are the last we intend to pull.  This afternoon I ordered a couple of boxes of Raptor composite (i.e.: plastic) staples and a special gun to shoot them.  It’s an expensive solution to the problem, but they sand like wood and can’t rust or rot so you don’t have to remove them.  They just stay in place and you finish the boat right over them.  After today, that seems worth nearly any price.

-Ben