Pneumatic Nailers--repair or replace?

[Dennis McDonaugh]

I went to use my ten year old PC round head framing nailer and it has an air leak. I looked at getting a rebuild kit for it, but the thing cost over $100 with shipping. That's two thirds the cost of a new one without labor to fix it. I'm thinking I'll just toss it and replace it. What do you think?

[John K Jordan]

Can you tell where the leak is? From inside somewhere, I assume. If it were mine, I would certainly take it apart find the leak, and try to fix it. It might be as simple as replacing an o-ring or something obvious and simple . Some rebuild kits are so expensive because they include lots of new parts you may not need to get it working.

You never know. I took one of mine apart and fixed it years ago (sorry, can't remember what it needed), but recently tossed a die grinder when I found worn parts I couldn't fix easily.

JKJ

[Rich Engelhardt]

I pulled out my lightly used Bostitch F28WW nailer a couple of weeks ago, loaded it up and pulled the trigger - - only to be greeted by a soft little "pop" instead of a nail being driven. Try as I might, all I got was a soft little pop.

I picked up this one from Harbor Freight since I had a bunch of 28* wire collated fasteners.

Same sort of dilemma - the repair place quoted me $25 to look at the gun but said it sounded like it needed a $100 rebuild that would take about 3 weeks for the parts to come in. They said Bostitch got real bad about parts all out of the blue about 6 months ago.

I needed a gun ASAP so I picked up the HF 3 in 1 and hung onto the sales slip.
The HF worked like a champ. It's not as powerful as the Bostitch, but,,,,few nailers are.

[Cody Colston]

I had the trigger valve on my Bostitch framing nailer start leaking after a few years. I replaced the valve and it's worked great for several years now. I don't remember the cost but it wasn't anything close to $100.