Just how fast is "fast"

Now we have a bunch of smart asses! Aren't there any younger roofers on this forum? I would be interested to hear how fast they are and how they do what they do. There are all kinds of videos of young guys working on roofs with gun nailers. Where are they?

We have all hand nailed a lot of shingles We have all gun nailed a lot of shingles. we have all worked on roofs by ourselves and with large crews. I am trying to find out how efficient we can be. It is supposed to be a learning forum, not a lying one. come on guys.

I was doing tin, copper and commercial BUR for years. Shingles was as sideline. Nailing, I was able to keep up with the gunners for an hour or two back in the day. Then, I just got more interested in charging enough to take an easy day to peck on 15-25 square and make the same money as I had been making byhumping for a 40-60 sq. day. :)

back in the 50s, when I was dating Marilyn Monroe, I shingled the empire state building, carried every bundle, the hard part was setting up the 1200 ft ladder.

Ah! so you just "push" the nail into the shake and then hit it.

Old School, this is what stick-nailing is:

First of all, there is no point in stick-nailing comp, it would undermine your net speed. As Tom indicates, it relates to the hand-nailing of wood shakes (and shingles, but lest this get too long and involved, more pertinent to shakes than to wood shingles.)

Normally a shake man will felt or have felted a significant field before he even thinks about sitting down to nail anything on. Material is then spread intelligently, above the immediate work zone but within reach from a sitting position. Material management is very important. You don't want to be moving things any more than you have to and you don't want to wear yourself out stretching for things any more than you have to. I'm sure you are completely familiar with this.

So you want to take a run (this is why wood shingles are not included in this discussion) that is as long as possible without expending too much energy reaching out to the end of it without getting up. You set these shakes, spanning the previous joints properly, (double-breaking the joints on the course below the preceeding one as well) and tucking the tips under the felt.

When they are fitted and set in place, you lean forward and nail them off, starting with the shake furthest from you and ending with the one closest to you. You tap in the furthest nail and then drive it cleanly with a follow-up hit, tap in the next nearest nail, and drive it home. And so on. You are still with me I'm sure. When you come out of your stripper, you want to have as many nails lined up between your index and middle finger as you can. They will be biased towards the back end of the finger slot. You roll one nail to the finger tip (without spilling the rest) and set it with the hatchet, and while you are driving it home you are rolling the next nail forward and placing it over the spot you will be wanting to drive it.

You can, and some guys remain unable to change from this, hold the whole row out and nip the end of the line to set the nail. But, over the course of the day, you will frequently get more than one nail this way, and sometimes while you are setting the end nail in the wood, you are also setting the second nail in your finger. Additionally, if you use this beginner's method, you will sometimes tick the meat of the index finger while you are setting a nail and by the end of the day, assuming you are pushing yourself for speed, your finger will little by little turn itself into hamburger. Very unpleasant in that condition to have to plunge it back into your bag to refill the stripper, and the more it hurts, the worse your rhythm gets and the more you hurt it. It can get quite bloody sometimes.

So, assuming you evolve naturally or through self-preservation, into a very fast nailer and want excellent placement of your nails, you learn to roll them. I know you are still with me here. Each nail then, ends up successfully pinched between your thumb and index finger and ready to go. So the rhythm sounds like this: tapTAP, tapTAP, tapTAP. Only it gets quite fast so you have to listen hard to hear the set marks.

Perfecting this technique along with a lot of other contingent things, will allow you get as many squares per day as you could ever want and be able to do it day after day, week in and week out.

Nonetheless... most guys exploring the boundaries of the process will experiment and refine their styles. The most natural thing in the world is to contemplate the possibilities that arise with that nail pinched between your thumb and index finger while the other hand is busy driving home the nail you just set. Right? I mean, the next nail is already in place. (Hmmm.....)

So then, while the hatchet drives home the last nail, you pinch the next nail more tightly than you would if you were just going to be lightly setting it. You take the nail and push it into the shake hard enough (this takes practice...a bit like the process of learning to juggle) so that it sticks upright when you let loose of it. No longer having to set it with the hatchet (because it is already set) your hatchet hand just drives it home while you are sticking the next one.

Yes? So now the sound is no longer tapTAP tapTAP tapTAP. It is TAP TAP TAP and your two hands move along parallel to the shakes, one sticking, the other driving what you just stuck.

Occasionally, the nail you stuck will not be sufficiently stuck and it will fall over on its side. This is part of the learning process and totally natural. The poor miserable hand that set it, automatically sucks it up and goes back to do the job right this time. Not a good thing. The driving hand wasn't expecting that. The driving hand is on automatic pilot. I've seen guys making the transition from hand-nailing comp to working with guns blank out and shoot their fingers for the same reason. The set hand flies automatically into place, the gun hand thinks it's just setting a nail, but the gun itself makes no such distinction. One way and another we do learn and adapt. :woohoo:

So that's that I hope. Stick-nailing eliminates nail-setting duty from the driving hand and it works easier on wet shakes than dry ones. It's a trip, I won't deny it. But it's not all it's cracked up to be and accuracy suffers, more or less depending on who's doing the stick-nailing and how hard they're pushing. It's a huge boost if you have a rookie setting shakes in front of you who's setting a course all the way to the end and you want to take a course of your own with you to compensate you for the beating you are taking crawling that much over the roof. I never forget, motion costs and if you want to be fast, you have to make the most of every motion.

I tried to explain it on an earlier reply....not sure if that's it.....I think Lanny could describe it....

Ok, so what is it?

I believe "stick-nailing" has to do w/shakes....

The term "stick nailing" has come up here an then with the descriptions of what they were talking about and the term "rotating nails", it must be what I have done for 50 some years. You take the nails into your hand and shake them and push with yur thumb to get them to fall between your fingers so that you can set them with the hammer and knock them down. Done it for years and never knew what it was called. If EGG hand nailed 30 squares in 8 hours that was really cranking! Good for him. I would be exhausted long before that.

I like the description EGG gives for what I always called "rotating nails". When I first started out, I had a couple of months experience and worked a day helping the owner of the company hand nail battens on a big job.

When he noticed I was using my mouth as a nail stripper, he said, "I can't believe Terry never taught you how to rotate nails, that's the first thing I teach somebody."

I took that to heart and immediately started to develop the practice. It took me about a half day until it became automatic, but 40 years later it's still an automatic reflex for me. I subsequently worked framing for a couple of years on a number of different crews and in each case I was the fastest nailer by far. I also won a lumber company contest for fastest nailer.

Yet later, I did my first (and only) comp job. I had to let my hourly helper go home 3/4 through the job because his wages had hit half of what I was getting for it.

Understanding we all come from various/diverse work/business experiences....

(This should be another topic)

A lot of us are geared to perform as productfully/timely as possible.....GC's demand it...Bldg. owners/HO's demand it.

IMHO....."Value", as it relates to construction, is a contractor's ability to PERFORM...A top quality service/product, (craftsmanship), is, of course the ultimate goal.

Have you ever noticed? Someone's that's really good at what they do, are also extemely proficient, as well...It goes hand-in-hand.

On the other hand, a good job can also be accomplished by one not so knowledgeable/effiecient. It will just take more time, (labor).

So...Apples to apples, the typical fair-minded/educated individual, (customer), is going to hire the more efficient contractor, at a lesser amount.

Divulging a bit....Taking the bldg. owner's position of complete lack of technical knowledge; One cannot rely on price alone; You can have a naive contractor that's cheap & another naive guy that's expensive.....One doesn't have the knowledge and is simply missing things..The other may not have the knowledge, however is smart enough to bid so high, so as to cover his/her inequities....The later can typically muster-through and end up up with a fair/good end qualty product, whereas the cheap guy has more incentive to skip corners/etc.....

There could also be a cheap guy, that's simply more efficient & an expensiver guy that is simply more expensive, to cover his less-than-desirable proficiencies. Both will deliver the same quality job.

So, it's fairly simple to understand why an owner wouldn't go with the cheapest guy...Even though the cheapest guy may be the best.

I've been following this thread, but have not felt compelled to chime in. I was wondering why.... Oh I know I have never really a production roofer. I've never kept track of # of squares to much extent.

I think I hand nailed 14 sq. on once before. Maybe gunned on 20 or so once or twice.

That's about it. Mostly we tear-off, clean-up and fix stuff.

OS, we've been posting here for so long I forget what I've said and not said so forgive me if I've already shared this somewhere. I agree, it's all about getting into and staying in "the zone." In modern sports, take baseball for instance, they talk about mechanics and a whole lot of money and fame rests on these mechanics. A guy like Willie Mays may have had such prodigious natural ability that some things just came naturally and you can certainly talk and think so much that you end up messing up natural talent, but release points and arm slots and posture and such have a huge impact on performance. How many hours do professional athletes spend on minute analysis of the films and working out with coaches, with practice and more practice. It's no different for us if we have the desire to perfect what we are doing. It's physical. It involves body memory and thought working in concert. We're athletes really and we have to follow a lot of the same rules of efficient body motion to get extraordinary results on a regular basis. I could/can stick-nail. That's fine. But when you fully develop your skills, stick-nailing is more like a card trick than the ticket to speed. You can set the succeeding nail on your recoil, no real need to stick it simultaneously with the drive on the first nail, and the net rhythm is less reductive over time while the accuracy is also greatly improved. Stick-nailing pushes hand-nailing very close to gun-nailing...puts it at a distance..while hand-nailing puts you closer and more in tune with the parts being attached. When I'm hand-nailing comp I use my left hand as a stripper. It's very important to master how you go back into your bag to replenish your nail supply and it's important how the nails move into the slots beween your fingers, what your thumb is doing to assist the dispersal, how well you avoid favoring the slot between the index and middle finger to the exclusion of the others. The squares materialize out of the impossible when you make them possible, but it takes training and practice and an addiction to the process. If it were some more highly esteemed (culturally) job, we would think nothing of pouring our energy into it. But here's the magic truth: the whole world shows up everywhere, every place, and every time. We're doing this, right here, right now, and we're making an art of it. Just because we can. Just because we want to. You can make it richer. You can make it more famous. You can add in a Stradivarius here and an Airforce I there, a battalion here and a fleet there, but in the end it's all the same. One body, one mind, one spirit, and a whole lot of practice to do something really really well and make it sing. You and I are obviously both for it. I'd venture to say we don't even really care about detractors or what other people think of us, because what we do brings its own reward. With applause or without. With remuneration or without. When I was younger, during a different recession, when I wasn't busy roofing I went out to a nursery and dipped potting cans for two cents apiece. I was grateful for every twenty dollars I got but I made an art of that while I was at it because anything less is just a waste of my time. Because I'm here now, because I'm doing this now. Get ready. Get set. Let's get it on.

Egg, wow! when you can keep it going all day like that and get those results you are in the zone. It is all rythyme once you get going. The hammer or hatchet keeps on swinging and the hand better get the nail ready to be set, then get out of the way. I found it easy to hit three nails in sucession, but the forth would sometimes mess me up. When you could hit all four and then move your body to get the next shingle off your knee and in place, it was a thing of beauty. the crews often fed off from each other too. It is really something to watch someone that is really good at it hand nail with 6 nails to the shingle. My dad and uncle did a 45 square roof with 6 nails in one day about 55 years ago.