Which Is Better: a Manual or an Automatic Nailer for a Hardwood Floor?

Portability

• One of the advantages of a manual floor nailer is portability. On average, manual floor nailers are lighter than their automatic counterparts. Because a manual floor nailer does not have to be plugged in, there is no cord to snag unsecured boards or drag construction dust across the finish of your new planks. Most automatic flooring nailers are suitable only for flooring jobs on sites with working electricity. Cordless automatic flooring nailers exist, but there is a limitation: charging the nailer when it runs out of battery power.

Price

• The purchase price of a floor nailer is often a deciding factor in choosing which model is best suited to you. You can invest more of your budget back into your wood floor if you go with a manual flooring nailer. An inexpensive manual floor nailer may cost around $150. A quality automatic floor nailer may cost more than $400. One way to bring the cost down is to rent. Rental prices for automatic and manual nailers are a fraction of the purchase price. But keep in mind that rental cost runs by the day. If the wood floor is large and this is your first flooring attempt, it may be more cost-effective to buy.

Exertion

• Putting in a hardwood floor is hard work. Manual flooring nailers make that work a little bit harder. To get a nail out of the nailer, you must pound the ram with a hammer with a considerable amount of force. Sometimes you must hammer more than once to get a nail to release. Multiply that by the hundreds of nails required to secure your wood floor and the extra exertion may slow down the job. Automatic nailers require much less labor. Some require you to hammer the nail out but with less force. Others have trigger mechanisms that are a cinch to use. That equates to less time hunched over on your knees putting weight on your newly installed wood floor.

Precision

• Automatic nailers are much easier on wood floors. Manual nailers -- especially inexpensive models -- do not have pneumatic controls to precisely determine the depth nails are driven. As you learn to use a manual nailer you may under-drive nails, which will then not hold boards tight against one another. You may over-drive a nail, which can split the wood. You must remove improperly driven nails, which may further damage the wood floors. Automatic nailers allow precise control, which minimizes depth-related error. Whichever nailer you choose, practice on scrap flooring first to master your technique.