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As promised, here's some video of Ruth nailing down a floorboard:
Instagram embeds don't seem to work on DW, so you gotta click through.
The piece of wood she's using to knock it into place first is Whack Friend, who is a staunch ally in these trying times. Basically, it takes some percussion to get a board into place but you can't hit the board itself with a mallet because you might damage the tongue. So you put the groove of a sacrificial piece of wood on there to distribute force past the tongue to the thicker part of the board, and then hit THAT piece. The tongue of the sacrificial piece will get in the way, so you should saw it off, and you should also decorate the piece somehow because otherwise you'll constantly lose track of it in your enormous piles of wood. Then you'll end up emotionally bonding with it, because after about two hours of this it feels like Whack Friend is the only one who understands you.
Standing on the board as you try to move it might seem counterproductive, but it's not. Keeps it from bouncing right back out again.
The big angled popgun thing is a pneumatic floor nailer. Her hammer blows aren't actually driving the nails in; that's done by about 80psi from an air compressor (borrowed from our hardcore handyman neighbors), and the white knob she's whacking is actually a valve. The reason the valve works by violence instead of pulling a trigger is because you're also trying to push the board up REAL SNUG against the last row as the nail goes in, to eliminate gaps. So it's dual-duty! Since the whack also activates the valve, the timing works out perfectly. It's a cleverly designed tool, IMO.
There's an art to judging how much gap you can close with brute nailing force; some boards are too warped, so you gotta call in help from the other person to bend it. (Or write it off as waste if it can't bend enough.)
Instagram embeds don't seem to work on DW, so you gotta click through.
The piece of wood she's using to knock it into place first is Whack Friend, who is a staunch ally in these trying times. Basically, it takes some percussion to get a board into place but you can't hit the board itself with a mallet because you might damage the tongue. So you put the groove of a sacrificial piece of wood on there to distribute force past the tongue to the thicker part of the board, and then hit THAT piece. The tongue of the sacrificial piece will get in the way, so you should saw it off, and you should also decorate the piece somehow because otherwise you'll constantly lose track of it in your enormous piles of wood. Then you'll end up emotionally bonding with it, because after about two hours of this it feels like Whack Friend is the only one who understands you.
Standing on the board as you try to move it might seem counterproductive, but it's not. Keeps it from bouncing right back out again.
The big angled popgun thing is a pneumatic floor nailer. Her hammer blows aren't actually driving the nails in; that's done by about 80psi from an air compressor (borrowed from our hardcore handyman neighbors), and the white knob she's whacking is actually a valve. The reason the valve works by violence instead of pulling a trigger is because you're also trying to push the board up REAL SNUG against the last row as the nail goes in, to eliminate gaps. So it's dual-duty! Since the whack also activates the valve, the timing works out perfectly. It's a cleverly designed tool, IMO.
There's an art to judging how much gap you can close with brute nailing force; some boards are too warped, so you gotta call in help from the other person to bend it. (Or write it off as waste if it can't bend enough.)