After I spent a month on vacation, the calluses on my fingers were gone. On my first day back to work, I had to hang 24 sheets of drywall. I suffered every time I plunged my tender fingertips into my nail pouch to grab a bunch of drywall screws. In a moment of pain and desperation, I saw a vision of a long-since-forgotten tool: my nail stripper (AJC Hatchet Co.; www.ajctools.com). I hadn’t used it since I first tried a pneumatic roofing nailer in 1982.
As shown in the drawing, a nail stripper is essentially a hopper for roofing nails. It’s a metal box that hangs around your chest by a rope or clips onto the front of a tool belt. It has two narrow slots in the bottom that allow the shanks of roofing nails to drop through but not the heads. Fill up the stripper with nails, and give it a shake. The points drop down through the slots, and you draw the nails out through small spring-hinged doors at the end of the box wide enough for the nail heads to exit.
As I’d hoped, bugle-head drywall screws fit as well as roofing nails. I just spread my index and middle fingers to grab a row of screws between them. Boy, did that speed production — and no more bloody fingertips. I usually fit six to eight screws between the fingers and rapidly reload the screw tip without fumbling to orient screw heads in my hand like the “old” method.
Had I been too much of a construction specialist, I probably would never have thought of the nail stripper. Being a generalist has exposed me to a variety of tools over the years. Here’s one tool not typically thought of as a drywaller’s tool that’ll see a lot of use on my job sites.
Mike Guertin, East Greenwich, RI
