Really cheap but not nasty Supatool battery staple gun

[Hoods]

I have started to do a fair bit of upholstery and so forth, and felt I needed something better in the way of a staple gun than the cheap one I had for the odd small job. (I do have an air stapler that came with a set of 3 guns I bought, but don't want to lug a compressor into the house every time I want to staple something, so I lashed out and bought the "best" (read most expensive) manual stapler, a Stanley, for just under $80 from Mitre 10. Salesman said it would "easily staple ply to hardwood" blah blah. Yeah right! One handed, it pushes a short light gauge staple into pine. Up the gauge and length and the staple doesn't even go all the way into pine unless you lean on it! Hardwood - forget it! As half the time you're using your other hand to hold the material you're stapling, this is worse that TOAB. (ie useless) Luckily I know the manager of our local branch pretty well and he's mates with the Stanley rep etc. so I will eventually get a refund. Yay.

Anyway, FWIW, I Googled away and found Transquip in WA were (are still I think) selling Supatool battery guns for $43 on special (marked down from $117, they say) so figured I had nothing to lose at that price. It took a full 24 hours to charge the battery - I thought I had a dud after 15-16 hours - the light doesn't change when it's charged, as far as I can see. Since then this thing has gone like a TRAIN, and so far I must have used about 200 staples and 100 brads still on that initial charge. Really, really useful for any number of jobs.

[Oddy]

Noticed a bunch of these on ebay also - under the brand "Demac". 99c auction with $30 postage. At this price might be worth a try for the convenience factor.

[munruben]

Great to hear something cheap is working so well.:2tsup:

[Oddy]

After Hoods review I decided to give one of these a try also.
It's basically the same as a very good hand stapler. i.e. staple is fired by a spring, but in this case the spring is compressed by a small motor rather than squeezing a lever with your hand. When you pull the trigger you hear the motor whir and the staple fires after about half a second.
So at the current price it is a very nice alternative to a hand stapler, and a little more powerful.
Don't expect a lot in terms of power however. I did some testing with the provided brad nails last night and found:
On pine - could fully embed the brad using about half power setting
On MDF - could fully embed the brad using full power
On fairly dense piece of merranti - could only half way embed the brad at fulll power.

So if you only need it for soft woods, mdf etc, great little cheap tool so far, but won't handle hardwoods or difficult jobs. Would definately buy over a hand stapler, but can't do the job of a decent pneumatic unit.