I finally stopped using those cheap brad nails after a job went south

Last week I was trimming out a living room in a house near Richmond and about half my brad nails just bent right over or didn't sink. I was using those no-name nails from a big box store figuring they're all the same. Turns out the coating on the cheap ones just doesn't hold up in hardwood especially around knots. My buddy who's been framing for 20 years told me to just spend the extra $7 on the good brand. Has anyone else fought with those generic nails or is it just me?

2 comments

2 Comments

nora_campbell6619d ago

Geez, I hear you on that! I had a similar thing happen with deck screws once. I bought this giant bucket of off-brand ones from a surplus store, thought I was being smart saving like 20 bucks. Well, I was building a simple little garden box and the heads just stripped out on half of them before they even bit into the wood. Had to wrestle a few of them out with pliers, what a mess. Learned my lesson, sometimes the cheap stuff is just cheap for a reason.

alice99119d ago

And that's the thing nobody really talks about with cheap hardware, it's not just the metal that's bad, it's the coating too. I bet those off-brand screws had some cheap coating that actually made the metal MORE likely to strip because it's too slick or too brittle. I noticed with name brand screws, the coating kinda bites into the driver bit a little, gives you more grip. Cheap ones just feel waxy and the bit slips right out the second you put pressure on it. And don't even get me started on the tolerances being off, I bet some of those screws were just a hair too small for the driver size they were supposed to fit.