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Spikes, Nails
In engineering, woodworking and construction, a nail is a pin-shaped, sharp object of hard metal, typically steel, used as a fastener. Nails for specialised purposes may also be made of stainless steel, brass or aluminium. more...
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Nails are typically driven into the workpiece by a hammer or by a nail gun driven by compressed air or a small explosive charge. A nail holds materials together by friction in the vertical direction and shear strength in lateral directions. The point of the nail is also sometimes bent over or clinched to prevent it from pulling out.
Nails are made in a great variety of forms for specialized purposes; the common everyday kind of nail is sometimes called a "wire nail" to distinguish it from nails in general. Some kinds of nails are referred to by other words, for example "pins", "tacks," "brads" and "spikes."
History
Nails go back at least to the Ancient Roman period. Until the end of the 18th century, they were always made by hand, a nailer providing them with a head and point. Until the early 17th century there were workmen called slitters who cut up iron bars to a suitable size for nailers to work on, but in 1590 the slitting mill was introduced to England, providing a mechanical means of producing rods of uniform cross-section. In the 19th century, after the invention of machines to make "cut nails", some nails continued to be made by hand, but the handmade nail industry gradually declined and was largely extinct by the end of that century.
Manufactured cut nails were first introduced in America at the end of the 18th century. Cut nails are machine-cut from flat sheets of steel (originally iron). They are also called square nails because of their roughly rectangular cross section. Though still used for historical renovations, and for heavy-duty applications, such as attaching boards to masonry walls, cut nails are much less common today than wire nails.
Types of nail include:
brass tack;
bullethead nail;
carpet tack;
casing - similar to finish nails but on a larger scale;
clout;
corrugated;
Dheadnails;
double-ended;
fiber cement;
finish;
horseshoe;
HurriQuake;
lost-head;
masonry - fluted nail for use in concrete;
oval brad;
panel pin;
plastic strip;
gutter spikes;
roofing tack;
shake - small headed nails to use for nailing sidewall shakes;
square;
T;
Teco - 1-1/2 x .148 shanks nails used in metal connectors;
veneer pin;
wire;
wire-weld collated;
Sizes
Most countries, except the United States and Canada, use a metric system for describing nail sizes. A "50 x 3.0" indicates a nail 50 mm long (not including the head) and 3 mm in diameter. Lengths are rounded to the nearest millimeter.
Canada uses a similar system except nail lengths are given in inches.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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