Bostitch MIIIFN 1-1/2- to 2-Inch Pneumatic Flooring Nailer

Bostitch MIIIFN 1-1/2- to 2-Inch Pneumatic Flooring Nailer Features

Additional Bostitch MIIIFN 1-1/2- to 2-Inch Pneumatic Flooring Nailer Information

Yes, it’s spendy, especially if you’re a homeowner just planning to do a couple of rooms. But if you weigh the cost of a professional installation, you come out miles ahead doing it yourself, even with this purchase, and you can work at your own pace instead of rushing a rental back to the store. If price is an obstacle, you might consider a manual nailer; you’ll pay about half as much, but you’ll do more than twice the work!

Professionals love this model, and for good reason. It’s made of aircraft-grade aluminum, so it’s light and strong. Your compressor needs to run between 60 and 100 psi, but best performance came in between 70 and 90 psi. There’s practically no learning curve, so with just a light tap of the mallet, you’ll be cruising along your flooring with 420 inch-pounds of nailing pressure.

The base plates – one is for half-inch planks, the other, ¾-inch -- are nice and wide, giving you rock-solid stability, and the magazine holds 110 fasteners, keeping reloading of your 1-1/2- to 2-inch cleats to a minimum.

We like the long-reach handle, but a shorter version is available, too. If you’re putting down hardwood or engineered flooring, you’d be doing yourself a favor by picking up this nailer. -- Kris Jensen-Van Heste

What’s in the Box
Nailer, graphite mallet, pre-finished flooring adapter foot

What Customers Say About Bostitch MIIIFN 1-1/2- to 2-Inch Pneumatic Flooring Nailer:

Great flooring nailer. of prefinished birch. I just used it to install 700 ft. of red oak and 300 ft. The base for the prefinished flooring worked well. Only had 2 jams.

Maybe the start of a new business. This has came in very handy for putting down our floors. One room done so far and 3 to go, plus friends and family wanting us to do theirs. Easy enough my 13 year old daughter and my 10 year old son can use it. My 4 year old isn't quite strong enough to trigger the nail, but at least he tried.I recommend getting the cleats with the gun.

The nailer worked fine. I used it alongside a manual nailer and it was worth the extra cost. Also the NO-MAR attachment made the tool a breeze to use and lived up to its name.

the prefinished flooring plate makes a simple and fast job of intalling prefinished flooring and protects the flooring from damage. nailer required the handle extension to be installed after receipt but the installation was easy, only four bolts. the prefinished flooring plate was not installed and the instructions for this were not as clear as they could have been, but even so it took but a few minutes to figure it out and install. if not extremely careful nailers w/o the special plate tend to mar the flooring. i would highly recommend this product for ease of use, quality of product, and performance.

5" wide boards mean half the cutting, fitting, and nailing compared to 2.5" wide boards.Also pick up a finish nailer to help when you're close to walls. This is a problem because it can fall half way out, then when you put the nailer down on the finished floor, it's easy for the sharp nail to scratch the finish. If you take the rubber guard off, a finish nailer can nail through the tongue just like this nailer. It likes to deform or break off.

You can tell it's made for the pros. Here's our experience:Pros:Beefy. The instructions say this is for finished floors whereas the normal plate is for unfinished (site finished) floors. It also seems like a clunky afterthought.

But if you get it 90% of the way in, you'll have to use a nail set to drive the nail in the rest of the way so that the next board fits. Get in the habit of setting the nailer on the unfinished part of the floor.The nailer includes a plastic shoe that bolts to the underside. The shoe was useless for us. It made it nearly impossible to line up the nailer with the tongue. We bought this nailer to install 1800sqft of hardwoods in our house.

But once installed, it worked fine.If you don't smack it with a hammer hard enough, it won't drive the nail in all the way in. If it's half way out, you can use channel lock pliers to pry the nail out. This is a real pain. The nail metal is soft. So we used it that way. And you can smack it hard to help get warped boards tight.It does exactly what it's supposed to.The included mallet feels like high quality, and its just the right weight.Cons:We had a lot of problems with the nailer allowing the last nail in a stack to fall out of the nailer. This is more operator error than anything else.

The normal plate didn't scratch the floor at all. Maybe softer woods would have scratched (we used distressed oak).Having to attach the handle was annoying. So smack it hard.How it could be better:Stop letting the last nail fall out.Make the nail cartridge slightly longer so you can put the next stack of nails in sooner.Redesign the handle.What we learned:For wood floors, wider is better. Less face nailing.