Barn: second story shaping up...

Barn: second story shaping up...  The builders have been busy today!  Nearly all the joists are in place, the framing for the stairway and the hatch are finished except for two joists (they ran out of metal hangers), and all but a few square feet of the floor are in place (they ran out of wafer board!).  Tomorrow morning they'll finish those last details up, when the new load of lumber arrives, and then the second story walls start going up.

In the last photo below, you can see one of the builders wielding a nail gun.  After watching these guys working for the past few weeks, I think this may be the single most useful tool they have.  It's an air powered gun that holds a magazine of 250 nails.  But the best part is how it's triggered.  One mode uses a conventional trigger, just like on an actual gun.  The other mode uses pressure on the very tip – you put the nose of the gun where you want the nail and then just press gently.  A skilled user can put a nail ever 8" down the 4' length of a joist running under the floor boards in less than two seconds.  That works out to 3.5 nails per second, each one perfect straight and perfectly driven.  A skilled framer wielding a hammer might be able to do one nail every two seconds, but won't be able to sustain that for very long.  They used the same nail gun to tack all the studs in place, making very short work of that more challenging nailing job (challenging because you're nailing at close to a 45° angle)...