We’ve mentioned our gripe with this design before, so we won’t belabor the point here. Hitachi still places the battery gauge on the tool rather than the battery.

In our experience, it’s best to throw out the handful of nails left in the magazine and insert a new stick to prevent jams. There’s a little plate underneath the pins that senses when you’re nearly out of nails, and it prevents operation. It will save time when you don’t have to go back to see where you ran out of pin nails. On the other hand, the dry fire lockout is excellent. We do wish, however, that a tool-free jam clearance was included here, rather than forcing us to reach for the onboard hex wrench. We won’t knock Hitachi for this as it just sort of comes with the territory. Suffice to say that we experienced a jam or two. Between the gun’s small clearance and the thinner metal of a pin nail, nails can jam up pretty regularly. Jams are pretty common with 23-gauge nails. Most pin nailers give you about 1/8-inch of adjustment, but this one gives you just shy of a 1/4-inch. You’ll need a reliable depth of drive adjustment for different wood hardnesses, and we found the red-wheeled adjustment on the Hitachi to be sufficient. The Hitachi impressively shot through 1″ maple during the course of our review. We didn’t find that to be the case at all. Some reviewers have expressed concern that a battery-powered pinner might have trouble in hardwood. This is a nice touch since we constantly lose the tips to other guns! Importantly, the tips have small nubs inside that not only hold snugly to the nose, but also to the onboard storage clips. We use the narrow one for tight spaces and the wider one for stability against the workpiece. Pin nail holes are easy to camouflage in natural wood, but there’s no hiding them in a white finish. It leaves a very small hole that is easy to fill without marring the wood. Sometimes the end cabinet is visible, so this is particularly important.

The Hitachi Cordless Pin Nailer does a beautiful job on this task. We use glue and pin nails to make more secure joints. We’ve found that the cabinet joints get loose over time using the assembly instructions alone. We often use a pin nailer to add reinforcement to box cabinets. This type of cabinet, very popular with our residential customers, arrives disassembled from the manufacturer. This safety feature ensures that I don’t dent up my work surface as the pinner drives home pins between 5/8″ – 1-3/8″. But eliminating most, if not all, of the recoil goes a long way to keeping my shots accurate and my work surfaces dent-free.Īdditionally, the Hitachi Cordless Pin Nailer includes a no-push safety nose tip. Granted, this thing isn’t firing with the same kind of force as a framing nailer. One of those features, a counterweight, helps to eliminate recoil. That’s why we appreciate a couple of features on this pinner that help save us from the frustration of having to replace damaged materials. However, the convenience of this tool’s cordlessness more than makes up for the heavier weight.įinish work is delicate, and it’s critical that you’re gentle with your work surface. At over 4 pounds with the battery, it likely weighs a bit more than your old pneumatic pinner. Hitachi claims that the slim, 3.0 Ah 18V battery will drive 3,000 nails per charge. A pinner that doesn’t require air hoses is a big advantage with trim work, which often takes us into awkward and tight spaces, potentially at the top of a ladder. Obviously, one of the main selling points of the Hitachi NP18DSAL revolves around its battery-powered operation. We can even use them as an alternative to clamping during a glue-up, which is especially helpful at angles other than 0° and 90°. More to the point, pin nails have no head, and they result in a very small hole that’s very easy to conceal. Delicate trim, small molding, quarter round, or anything else that a larger fastener might split can be safely attached with a pinner. There are numerous carpentry applications for these tiny nails.

Micro pinner compressor