Loading Nail Guns for DIY Dummies

Nail guns come in a wide varieties of types and formats

It's not unusual for our staffers to be reading through posts and come across a sentence or even a single word that tickles their internal bullshit detectors. It's usually because the terminology just plain doesn't match the research team member's experience. Admittedly, sometimes the detector throws a false alarm: the staffer wasn't familiar with the usage or was only aware of a synonym for the word. Other times, though, it's a dead giveaway that someone's faking it: someone like eHow.com's William Jackson, who did just that in "How to Load Nails in a Nail Gun."

In the interests of full disclosure, the staff carpenter owns a framing nailer, a finish nailer, and a pneumatic stapler. Because of pretty extensive practice at loading those three tools, he was able to follow Jackson's instructions, but he still found them ludicrous.
Jackson opens with boilerplate about the utility of nailers, in which the "professional writer" informs his readers that,

"This powerful tool embeds nails almost effortlessly and can save you time and toil."

Well, that's true. Nail guns also set nails accurately and quickly, which is probably more to the point than "effortlessly," but we'll let that pass. As for the instructions, it's pretty straightforward: Open the magazine and slide in the nails. Some nails are collated in sticks, some are collated in coils; the magazine shape should be a dead giveaway as to the style of refill.
William, as befits someone who has probably never used a nail gun himself, did what eHowians had done since the first post at the site (which appears to have been "how to ask for a raise" back in 1999): he found a user's manual and reworded it. Unfortunately, we have no idea what brand and model he cribbed. What we do know is that his familiarity with nail guns was pretty limited. Here goes:

• "Obtain a clip of nails to load into your nail gun. While some nail guns have a sleeve that runs perpendicular to the barrel of the gun, most nail guns are angled nailers in which the sleeve connects at an angle..." – WTF is this "sleeve"? Is it like the magazine?
• "Slide the clip of nails into the notch at the bottom of the sleeve, and holding the gun upside down, let the clip fall all the way to the end." – Instructions specific to the model whose manual Jackson found. None of the AN staffers' nail guns require that the nailer be turned upside down. That, and the magazine typically has a spring-loaded latch that must be opened before loading.
• "Press the button inside the spring mechanism that is attached to the sleeve and slide it all the way back past your nails within the sleeve, still holding the button." – Oh: there's the spring-loaded latch. Those instructions, though, read like they're for a Swingline® stapler...
• "Let the button slide back towards your nails until it clicks." – The "button"?

Jackson learned (somewhere) that there are straight and angled framing nailers, but he apparently remained ignorant of clipped vs. round head; framing vs. finish vs. roofing vs. siding, etc.; and the vagaries of different brands. Nope, either from laziness, greed, or ignorance, our Dumbass of the Day pretended that there is one and only one model of nail gun.

That's not to mention that it looks very much as though he did a lousy copy-reword-paste job on the manual he did crib his instructions from.

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