Nailed

Bank Teller: Wow, you’re rich, what are you going to do with all that money?

K.T.: I don’t know. You know, I have no idea whatsoever. I really should have come up with something clever to say beforehand.

She caught me flat-footed while cashing a ten dollar check. It sucked. What I should have said was that I was going to the same party as the guy before me (whom had just received a giant stack of one dollar bills), but I was going to have to leave early. You take away my humor, and I have nothing.

***

My first nailgun experience was the original Quake, played five years after it first released. Though Quake II was one of the many games that sustained me through college, I didn’t possess a computer powerful enough to run the original Quake. So, on a lark (as with nearly everything I do), I downloaded and installed the original Quake. How charming, you had to hold down a button to mouselook. That sucked. I went through the levels, marveling at the blocky enemies, the charming level design. Then I found a nailgun.

Woo.

There are two weapons I remember from that game: the rocket launcher, because every first person shooter has a similar weapon, and the nailgun. Those little triangular pellets shooting out at high velocity seemed like they’d screw up some enemies from close range. And they did. Such a high rate of fire. Such a novel weapon, carpentry applied towards more gruesome ends. It makes me sad that more games don’t have a nailgun. The poor man’s railgun, chunks of metal propelled at relatively low speeds, but still packs a punch. Plus, most of the weapons in first person shooters don’t scare me enough, as I’ve never used them in real life.

Now that I’ve had a chance to use a nailgun, I want one. Though I’ve been working for a few months, I’ve never really wanted to use the nailgun. A couple of weeks in, when I first helped to assemble crates, A.G. wielded the nailgun while I held the planks in place. Bam, a nail went through off center, and most of the nail extruded through the wood, pointed directly at my right testicle. Since then, I’ve had an understandable aversion to the nailgun.

Last Friday, we were assembling crates again. K.R. asked if I wanted to nail for a while. I assume this was because his arm was getting tired. I assented.

Woo.

The nailgun uses compressed air to embed a three inch nail into wood. The nailgun will not fire unless you depress the barrel catch into your target, except when you switch to automatic. The barrel press can be circumvented by pulling it back using a swatch of cloth and firing. Each nail “magazine” consists of about fifteen corkscrewed nails lined up in a slant, connected with thin yellowy plastic. These you load into the chamber directly below the barrel. With every press of the trigger, the air shoots a nail through the barrel, expels the air through the rear of the gun in a large puff, and emits a loud crack. The plastic more often than not goes flying, leaving little bits everywhere after twenty-five crates have been built. Given the quality of the wood, when you fire a nail, the odds wood chips and splinters fly outward are pretty good; we generally take at least one shot of wood shaving to the eyes.

The nails are loud, bottled thunder loud, spike-driving sledgehammer loud. If the Greeks had a god of carpentry, surely she would have sounded something like the loading bay sounds. Hephaestus got nothing on Carpentria. (If I’ve screwed up Greek/Roman gods, I have no access to the internet right now, and you’ve got to look up something on your own.)

The nailgun itself is not very heavy, but given its size, it is quite unwieldy. I needed two hands to steady it, one on the handle and trigger, one on the air chamber. Simple, just line up the wood, place the barrel to the wood, press inward, fire. Repeat. Now, I’m not that destructive, but there was something liberating about firing nails into wood. Whether it was that I was helping something take shape from something less, or that I was granted the power to put holes into things, I don’t know. All I know is that with each successive thud, and my degrading hearing, I was having some real fun.

I nailed four crates, driving nails with a heavy-handed crash. Chips would fly everywhere. I’ve come to notice that when I blow my nose on days after crate building, my snot is full of black detritus. Not a good sign. Nonetheless, the power of these nails was incredible at close range. If I had to face the hordes of hell, surely I would take a nailgun with me at some point.

I don’t know for sure why it was so good to fire nails, but I know that I kept doing it.

We would later supplement this fun by firing nails into long distance targets. An air-powered nailgun has little accuracy beyond ten feet, definitely a close range weapon. Nails would rotate along the Y and Z axes, rather than spiral along the X. Still, when they connected, it looked like it would hurt. Like a bullet to the brain.