Manual speed feeding drywall screws
jdarylh1
| Posted in Construction Techniques on
Can someone tell me how really fast rock hangers can grab a bunch of screws and feed them as fast as they can push their guns to the wall? I can’t even hold a handfull of screws without getting stabbed, let alone figure out how to push one of the heads out to where my bit can grab it. I’d love to develop the technique if someone could tell me how it works.
Practice of course, but is there some particular method to it?
Replies
Getting paid by the square foot....and practice.
Actually, you can kind of give a handful a loose shake to align them...thumb and forefinger to feed and turn them end for end when necessary.
they make a nail or screw bag with a slot that drops screws point down and lets you pull em out 1 at a time sometimes you have to shake the bag to get em to drop... i just line up about a dozen held in my lips... sometimes the magnetic screw tip will grab em out of the bag you just have to line em up..... hang'n rock is one of those things that pay'n by the board makes it where you really don't care how long they take do'n it just so long as the scrap pile isn't full of 3/4 boards
pony
Three good ideas here: one - take a handful of screws and just practice turning them so that the head is out, two: get a specialty nail bag, and three: line up as many as your lips will hold.Last summer our house was reroofed. The roofer's compressor broke and they had to nail the whole thing by hand. They had these little metal boxes fastened to their belts that they dumped nails into. The box had a tapered bottom and a slot so that the nails slid down and and the points stuck out.They'd grab a whole row of nails between two fingers and the nailing seemed to go pretty fast that way. I guess something similar to that is what the nail bag with the slit is. I asked them where they got the boxes but since they mostly spoke Spanish and I didn't, it was kind of a problem. Thanks for the help.
BTDT, got the shirt.
It is all in timing, and knowing big a handfull of screws to grab. If you fill your hand completely with screws, you can't feel and rotate the scews as you try to feed them to your fingers. Takes me about 2 1/2 losse handfulls to hang a 10' board. As I insert the last screw in the screw gun, my hand falls in to my offside bag, and reloads.
You get a feel for the right amount of screws you can handle, and the rest comes with practice. Locking the screw gun trigger on and holding in a palm push grip keeps the drive hand from getting cramped and/or tired.
Before nail guns, most roofer did a similar trick with roofing nails. Handfull of nails and rolling them head up between the index and social finger of the off hand was part of learning to keep up. I've known roofers that could rival the speed of an air nailer for the total number of squares applied per hour.
Dave
get a self feeding gun.new day, new age. Ya know?
Be well
a...
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A friend of mine does commercial finish work, tons of DW.He says that in the right application he uses the autofeed screw guns.But it is often easier to just hand feed them.
Before pneumatic tools, when every nail in a building was driven with a hammer, the flip and drive technique was employed by every framer, roofer or sider with a handful of nails.
Flipping ultra sharp drywall screws wasn't a big stretch for a calloused hand and sometimes, if you were lucky, a whole week would go by without pulverizing your thumb with a hammer or driving a screwbit deep into the joint of the next finger.
As a long time peiceworker/rocker I would strongly advise against putting any fasteners in your mouth.
Try hanging all day and look at how filthy your hands have become with oil from the screws.
One of the first things I was taught back in '78 was don't put galv. nails in your mouth
I don't think a self loading gun could ever keep up with a good ol' hustling rocker.
Well it's off to work, doing coreboard shafts this week!
Tried the auto feed a few years ago and after the first job when it was brand new and kept on jamming we gave up on it. The rockers said they could do it fatser manually. There is a contest sponsored by either DeWalt of Makita annualy..and a few years ago I recall the winner did 8 screws in 5 seconds manually..or near that.
If you read the fine print on the box the screws come in it says self aligning, I buy only those.
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Self aliging screws...I guess that must be like self mitering base molding?I thought about getting an autofeed Senco but after reading a number of posts here decided against it. I'll probably just work on the "handful of screws" technique unless I can find or make one of those metal boxes. If I get speared once to often, then we'll see about the Senco.