Who hasn't tried to drive a nail into a piece of wood and invariably you get a crack in
the lumber? Now, why do you think that happens? Well contrary to popular belief, most people think that the nail isn't sharp enough
That's exactly the problem. The nail is too sharp. If you have a nail that has a very sharp tip, almost razor like, what actually happens is
if you drive it into the lumber, it splits the wood apart much like a wedge as you split
lumber for your fireplace. Okay, so how do you prevent it? What you want to do is dull the tip of the nail down so that it's very blunt and what
will happen is as you drive the nail into the wood that way, it actually crushes the
wood fibers and pushes them out of the way. That's the way to prevent splitting
Now, a good common example of this are flooring nails that are used to put in hardwood flooring
Those nails are actually very blunt tip and they work really, really well and they won't
pull off the tongue as you drive the lumber in. When you sometimes get near the edge of a piece of lumber though, the trick of blunting
the nails won't work. In those instances, you're going to have to use a drill and drill a very small pilot hole
that's less than the diameter of the nail all the way through your piece of lumber
If you do that, you're not going to have any splitting problems whatsoever. Okay, how do you blunt a nail, a big one, for example, like the 16-penny framing nails
The way we do it is take your nail, put the head on a solid surface and use your hammer
just to tap the top of the nail so that you actually blunt that very sharp tip
Really, really simple to do. Remember, some of the other nails like the finish nails we use in nail guns and other
ones come pre-blunted. The manufacturer does it for you. Okay, splitting wood, you can avoid those problems
All you need to do is use nails that are not sharp or drill a pilot hole
Do that and you'll have split-free lumber. If you want to discover more home improvement tips, go to AskTheBuilder.com