Here's the answer for your nailpulling needs!

Crowbars shouldn't pull nails.

It's a common story. A man (or woman) sets about doing some item on a long chore list, and lo and behold! there's a problem.
A simple procedure cannot be accomplished with the simplicity you had assumed and allocated for the task. Let me tell you my story, and I think that most of you will be quite sympathetic.

When I bought my log cabin in the fall of 2000, it was a (then) single man's dream. Located in the mountains of Sun Valley Idaho, it was a small cabin built almost completely by just one master log smith to fulfill his itching desire to apply his oft- hired out but well-honed skills to finally achieve his own personal dream. This man, Tom Cooper, saved up his literally "hard earned" money for years, in order to be able to take off enough time to pick the rocks off a nice piece of ground north of Hailey Idaho and apply his artistry to a design he'd drawn up for a very well built log cabin that he could, in the ancient traditions of thousands of men before him, build with his very own hands using mostly the "supplies the land supplied".
He trekked up into the thick forest above the Wood River Valley and began to fell just the right hand picked trees. Since it was 1970, he was able to group his cache in the mountains long enough for him to come back and haul them all down to the building site without anyone else hauling them off first, or coming back to find them turned into firewood for some other remote, but already finished cabin. After successfully transferring his wooden treasure trove down to his now cleared acre, he went to work on his dream design.
This man was already an anachronism in his approach: he peeled each log on site and carefully fit them together to create the house he would soon call “home”. Over the next two and a half years he worked and worked, actually living in a cold dug out basement while he built this small masterpiece overhead.

Almost 35 years later, it is still a thing of rare beauty, and for me a work of art; it is a giant sculpture hewn of wood. The doors, the windows, the furniture, the window frames and all the tiny intricate details were all made by hand. When I first laid eyes on it, it had lain empty for a year and a half, first being used as a rental property for a few years, then finally owned by an absentee from Florida, who put it on the market for my purchase. Tom Cooper was long gone, rumor had it he'd gone on to scout some less populated land in Russia, but his jewel remained. As is the case with a creation from any earlier time there were just a couple of things that didn't transition well from the early 1970's. One of the necessary changes was the original shag carpet that still draped the basement floor, right over the concrete. Carpet has a bad habit of storing a great many things. Suffice to say every single one of them would not be a choice for any of us to purposely retain, so the carpet had to go! It was a delightful purple and green if my eye were so unfortunate to snap a memory photo.

One day I made it my duty to begin the transition to Pergo. I knew that there were quite possibly a dozen potential problems with this choice, but I'd recently come to love the hardiness of this stuff, Pergo, and the relatively cheap overall price when compared to oak. It was a basement I know, but we'll deal with that in another blog. What I'm really here to tell you about today is the birth of quite possibly the most convenient, potentially obvious new hand tool that I'm aware of being created in a long time. I'm talking about the Nail Jack, and no, I didn't name it that day, my nephew Jack was there for the naming some years later, but the day I'm referring to here was when I came up with the idea to simply rip out that old carpet with all it's chronological archaeological strata of sloughed skin and God Himself only knows what else! I knew it couldn't stay, but there...there's the rub! I had to first get that perfectly good baseboard out! Most people have that little list for the weekend at one point or another. Some of us pride ourselves on having a list for EVERY weekend! Us married folks have come to call it the "Honey Do" list. (Yup, somewhere along the way in this story my bachelor cabin became filled with a whole family, but again, that's another blog!) Anywho...that baseboard never hurt a living soul and it was solid pine, stained to match and there was no way it was getting chucked into some landfill and anyway I never could cut angles like whoever did these cuts.

Look, what I'm trying to say is, these beautiful pieces of wood were just temporarily in the way, but they still played a future part in this basement in my estimation. I’d remove the carpet, install the Pergo and these perfectly good pieces of pine would return flush up against the Pergo!

So I dutifully sketched out the diagram of the basement and began to number the location of each piece and sorta create some kind of Leonardo da Vinci GPS map of where these pieces were going to return when this project was over! Like some long beautiful egg (I know, I'm bad at metaphors, analogies and personifications!) each piece would be laid back in its little nest (wow! that's bad!) and take its place as the "hide" for the Pergo. Little problem develops here.

I take my crowbar out and go to town, gently separating these lovely pieces from the wallboard down near the carpet and begin to carry them gently (after implementing my brilliant letter/number GPS filing map system) to the porch upstairs outside the front door. Can you guess what I began to notice? Someone got "jiggy" (is that even a word, a figure of speech, slang?) with the brad nailer! Whomsoever (I also could never figure out the who and whom rule, so I default to the magical "whomsoever") was responsible for the "nailing" of these pieces of pine must have planned for tornado conditions, or had a relative that owned a brad factory, because the backs of these pieces of baseboard shimmered like a platinum porcupine with a plethora of 15 gauge shiny needles! Yes, these baseboard pieces could NOT be put back on those lovely walls without being gleaned of all these brads!

What do you think I did when I saw all those lovely spiny baseboards in the bright light of an Idaho summer day? I did what any man does when confronted with a tool task! I merely headed for my well stocked tool chest and began to flip through my mega choices in the pliers section for the answer to this all too common scenario. "Sir!" I said to meself, imagining a bit like I was some famed surgeon, "Hand me the rapid brad remover!" No reply. Well, I replied, without having to track the unwarranted work of satisfying the "quotes" rule, there's some nippers in here, or the famed "linesman's pliers!" Now I was only partially utilizing the quotes, but it seemed to be okay, because there's freedom to be found in participating in the evolution of blog punctuation, so I says "where's the tool that is actually designed for such a common and annoying problem as the quick yet efficient removal of nails, staples and brads?"

Silence.

Now whether it was a rhetorical question, I know not. I do know now that there was an accounting on that day, an inventory. Try as I might, I couldn't find the tool, nor did I know whether my collection, gathered for years, had simply come up short. Surely this tool was in the aisle at my beautiful sojourns to the Sunday Craftsman tool HQ. After church, it was an easy second on my list for that day. I know I'm dating myself but that was where we ALL went, wasn't it? We knew the 99 piece socket set was going to end up at $59.99 sometime right? There we were, and it was all so beautifully simple! One lovely source, and a place to bring these chrome treasures back to, like some kangaroo rat, or whatever ferret like creature loves to store up the "shiny". Look, you all know what I'm talking about...I just needed a "nailpuller", and don't be so cute as to try and convince me the back of a hammer was going to work that day! We all know, down in the base of our caveman brain that you could never "dig" the head of a brad anyway. You could never “grab” with a cat’s paw! You also ruin the front (good) side of the baseboard by trying to do anything but pull the brads through the back! So where's the DEDICATED tool? This is the 21st century isn't it? We spent all our time on the fastest computers and the greatest memory sticks and cell phones and fax machines and the internet (which I also love) and gmail (rocks!) and all the other stuff, where's the nailpullers? Where is a tool that can dig, GRAB and pull a nail, a staple or a brad? Come on man, a cat's paw is a bit like a big stick in the hands of a caveman! Duh, the lever, the fulcrum, eureka I have found it! Where? Do I attempt to control the nippers with just the right amount of pressure that I can pull but not cut through these brads?

That was the day that changed a good part of my life. Yes, there needed to be a spring loaded pliers like tool that could grab these brads from the back and rip them through so quickly that you never gave a second thought! And (I know, don't start a sentence with "and") why not have a tool that you can also use to dig the "head" of a nail out (or grab the head of a brad) that has a "hammer tap" designed right on it to really "dig" for a nail, and teeth that will grip this fastener and pull it out of your material from the front or the back? I know! I'll call it the "Nail Jack" and my company will be called "Nail Jack Tools". http://www.nailjack.com/ http://www.nailjacktools.com/