Thread: nailing fence palings

Quite by accident I found a better way to nail up palings. I've done a fair bit of fencing and have always nailed off each paling with the gun as I went, then check after about 5-6 for plumb, bring in any corrections with the next few etc, nail a few more and repeat.
Last week I was doing a fence on the edge of a retaining wall about 1500mm high so I could only reach the bottomrail while standing at the bottom of the retaining wall. I was working alone and thought this was going to be a bloody slow day. What I did was nail in about 7-10 palings in the bottom rail only (whatever I had stacked on the step ladder beside me). Then up the ladder, plumb up the last paling I had nailed up then back-nailed all the palings in that lot, then back down the ladder and repeat with the next lot. Was very fast, even with all the up and down ladder. When it came to flat ground I kept doing it that way. Stayed bent over, nailed in about 10 palings in the bottom rail only, plumbed up the last one nailed them all off. If I had a really wobbly paling I either didn't use it or nailed it off straight before continuing with my system. Worked a treat. You're not fiddling about trying to add little bits of correction here and there, you can MAKE them plumb before nailing off. Howver, I suspect I may have just reinvented the wheel.

Cheers
Michael

And the other thing that made it faster was using aspare rail along the ground as a ledger to give a nice line along the bottom of the palings.