Nails or Screws

[Triassic]

I’m fixing my battens and counter battens for the external fibre cement cladding.

 

I’ve nailed the first batten in place, now I’m wondering what’s best,  4 inch galvanised nails or 4 inch screw to fx the counter batten through the batten and into the timber frame?

[nod]

We normally gun nail all 

As long as you use a ring nail

They will never pull out 

[Triassic]

Unfortunately I don’t have a nail gun!

[iSelfBuild]

1 hour ago, Triassic said:

Unfortunately I don’t have a nail gun!

 

Our compressor, coil nail gun and framing gun (50-70mm from memory) is sat gathering dust up in Scotland. I don't need it for a couple of months and my dad is banned from doing anything more than putting his socks on for the next 8 weeks after his operation. I can ask him if he minds lending you it as it will speed the job up massively! I'm heading up there next week, do you have a compressor? That won't fit in my car unfortunately.

[Triassic]

1 hour ago, iSelfBuild said:

Our compressor, coil nail gun and framing gun (50-70mm from memory) is sat gathering dust up in Scotland.

Thanks for the kind offer, I’m happy with my old fashioned hammer, as I’m working on my own, so only have one speed!

[Jeremy Harris]

3 hours ago, nod said:

As long as you use a ring nail

They will never pull out 

 

I've been regularly going around our cladding replacing ring shank nails that have been pulling out, just from movement of the wood, with screws.  Here's two more that have worked their way out and need replacing:

 

 

[Mr Punter]

The smooth Paslode hot dip galv are good. They have a coloured coating on the tip that lubricates, then heats ups and acts as a glue. They are more difficult to pull out than the ring shank ones and will have shards of wood glued to the end if you extract them.

[Onoff]

All the T&G chipboard flooring upstairs here was put down with angular ring nails. OMG the noise / squeaks! Whenever I've had carpet up I've tried to cure with Spax floorboard screws.

[Mr Punter]

@Triassic I am trying to picture your batten arrangement as it is often OK to just fix a vertical batten to the timber frame, then your render carrier board fixes to these.

[Triassic]

12 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

@Triassic I am trying to picture your batten arrangement as it is often OK to just fix a vertical batten to the timber frame, then your render carrier board fixes to these.

I’m putting on horizontal battens first, then vertical battens second, this then gives me something substantial to fix additional vertical battens where boards butt up to each other.

[Mr Punter]

Probably a bit more weather resilient too.

[Jeremy Harris]

54 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

The smooth Paslode hot dip galv are good. They have a coloured coating on the tip that lubricates, then heats ups and acts as a glue. They are more difficult to pull out than the ring shank ones and will have shards of wood glued to the end if you extract them.

 

Thanks, I'd not heard of these.  The nails we used were galvanised ring shanks from NailFast, not the Paslode ones.  One of the guys had a Paslode gun, the other had an Hitachi, but I can't see any difference in the way the nails are performing between the two (in general the Paslode nails are towards the right hand side of the boards and the Hitachi ones towards the left).

 

One mistake I made a couple of years ago, was to replace some of the pulled out nails with screws that were both too hard and not that well protected against corrosion (the cheaper Screwfix silver "outdoor" ones).  Several of these screws have broken under tension, again from board movement, and have been replaced with thicker shank screws.

[Ed Davies]

1 hour ago, Triassic said:

I’m putting on horizontal battens first, then vertical battens second,

 

Isn't the usual thing to fix vertical battens to the sheathing, then put horizontal battens across if needed for the cladding, to avoid damming any water that runs down the sheathing?

[Triassic]

I’m cladding mine in weather board, hence the need for the battens to by vertical.