All of em are now disposable toys. The first palm nailers were invented by a company called Danair, and the tool itself, Aerosmith out in our Central Valley farmlands. Dan was a large orchard fruit grower who employed local women to assemble fruit crates in their warehouse, and was seeking a better way to do that. Then he adapted the idea into a power mallet used to tap in windshield moulding. Our shop foreman put a big center punch on one for sake of screw indentations on metal door frames. We had a huge door and window business. Then the massive seismic retrofit era arrived, with the demand to do cripple wall and metal strap nailing in confined crawl spaces. Put two and two together, and we sold hundreds of them. Not silly at all, but a game-changer.
This was a high quality machine made of diecast parts, and with a periodic O-ring maintenance, could be kept going 20 or 30 years of hard use. The current import variety lasts about 6 months if equivalently used. I even had them make a customized nail punch for the flooring trade, which dramatically saved time, but never caught on like the framing and metal connector applications did. This is ground zero for proverbial Calif. earthquakes. I was talking to my sister on the phone yesterday right when she said something was shaking, which turned out to be a modest 4.5 event with its epicenter fairly close to where she lives.
I was also personally involved in every painful inch of going airless, either via fuel canister or battery, and was often the first persons to actually test prototypes in real-world applications. Great ideas got poorly executed manufacture-wise, leading to one bellyflop after another. We were a pro house, so rejected every unproven toy concept. Once I even handed the mfg sales rep his piezo hoseless finish gun back to him with a mallet cap attached to its top, implying the only real way to use it was upside-down like a regular hammer, along with an ad illustration of an ape-man cracking a nut with the thing. Times have changed. Now most choices are disposable and not worth repairing, with nobody left to repair them anyway. Reminds me of cellphones and consumer digi cameras. Nobody cares; no pride in manufacture anymore. Just outsource it.
