Flooring Nailers, Framing Nailers, All Types of Nailer.

Yes, it's spendy, especially if you're a homeowner just planning to do a couple of rooms. But if you weigh the cost of a professional installation, you come out miles ahead doing it yourself, even with this purchase, and you can work at your own pace instead of rushing a rental back to the store. If price is an obstacle, you might consider a manual nailer; you'll pay about half as much, but you'll do more than twice the work!

Professionals love this model, and for good reason. It's made of aircraft-grade aluminum, so it's light and strong. Your compressor needs to run between 60 and 100 psi, but best performance came in between 70 and 90 psi. There's practically no learning curve, so with just a light tap of the mallet, you'll be cruising along your flooring with 420 inch-pounds of nailing pressure.

The base plates - one is for half-inch planks, the other, ¾-inch -- are nice and wide, giving you rock-solid stability, and the magazine holds 110 fasteners, keeping reloading of your 1-1/2- to 2-inch cleats to a minimum.

We like the long-reach handle, but a shorter version is available, too. If you're putting down hardwood or engineered flooring, you'd be doing yourself a favor by picking up this nailer. -- Kris Jensen-Van Heste

What's in the Box
Nailer, graphite mallet, pre-finished flooring adapter foot

Porta-Nails beat you to it. With a simple hardware change (two nuts and a screw), the 421P becomes a face nailer or angle nailer, saving you time and exertion on those first and last few rows of face-nailed flooring and speeding you through the rest of the installation. Connected to a compressor, the 421P needed only a squeeze of the safety trigger and light mallet blow to pneumatically drive the 2-inch serrated nails through the tongue and into the subfloor. Porta-Nails' exclusive "ratcheting ram" doesn't return to the start position until the fastener is properly seated, so you know every nail you drive is doing its job. You'll want to adjust your pressure to get just the right countersink before going ahead with your project, but be sure not to exceed 110 psi.

If the nailer should jam, clearing is quick and easy, because you don't have to remove the shoe to open the latch clip. Fasteners load easily, and the magazine holds 200 2-inch nails, so you spend more time installing and less time reloading. We liked the fact that the shoe bases are all non-marring, and the rubber mallet is capped, too, to prevent marking your flooring.

There's really only one mistake you can make with this nailer, and that's to work too hard. You'll be tempted as we were to grip the nailer tightly and really give it a good hit, but trust us: You'll get far better results by relaxing your stance and delivering a comfortable blow to the ram.

It's easy enough for the first-time home do-it-yourselfer to install a floor and save a bundle on labor costs, and the professional will use it on every hardwood installation job. Definitely worth the investment.--Kris Jensen-Van Heste