Neanderpundit

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A bunch of years ago, I was helping a friend of mine build a garage in the middle of noplace. We had gotten it under roof and had the outside walls up, and I was there, working alone, hanging interior walls. I had a Paslode cordless framing nailer, which was a godsend, and I was just framing away. It was a fine day, and I was moving right along.This was before the day of the anti-tiedown on nailers, most guys taped the switch down and used the nose switch to trigger the nailer, just pressing against the board triggered it and it shot a nail.

I was struggling with a particularly virulent case of athelete’s foot at the time, and it was killing me this day; I’d bet I took my steel toes off a dozen times to scratch and apply gold bond.

One time, though, in an absentminded moment of personal stupidity, I put my foot up against a wall, and scratched it with the nailgun. Remembering the taped down trigger and hearing the gun fire happened almost instantaneously. So there I was, standing on one foot, nailgun in hand,hammer at least six feet away, right foot nailed to a wall about 3′ up in the air.

SO I bent down and grabbed a stud off the pack, and dragged the hammer to me, where, as gently as possible, I hooked the claws under the head (thankfully I had gone through the steel toe, otherwise ithe head would have been buried in the meat of my foot) and pried the nail out of the 2×4, the boot sole, my foot, and the steel toe.

I bled pretty good for a long time. It had gone through the foot just between the second and third toe, not hitting any major blood vessels, and not causing any major collateral damage, but it hurt like hell.

I had to finish out the day, so I did, another two hours. And I got all the interior walls up. But I was in some pain. ANd I took the tape off the switch.