Plywood Nail Gun Trigger

I borrowed a nail gun from a friend to help me build my deck.

The trigger was missing, and I had initially thought I could just make it work without, but it was pretty difficult to do so — especially firing the nail at the correct time.

I decided to spend a few minutes trying to make one out of plywood.

Thoughts on 3D Printing

I've shared some 3D printing repair projects recently, and I have more on the way. It's tempting to jump to the idea of 3D printing for all kinds of repairs if you have a printer. However, if you have a bandsaw and sanding capabilities, 3D printing is often no substitute in terms of quick prototyping.

Modeling, printing, testing, and iterating on something like this with 3D printing can be time consuming and wasteful — especially if you have no reference part, which I don't.

I love how Matthias Wandel expressed this in the excerpt embedded here:

So I need some custom hose flange to fit on here and if I had a 3D printer, I could design that and print that out and spend a day at it. Fortunately, I don't have a 3D printer, so I just used a piece of 4x4 beam, cut a hole in it with a bandsaw, then cut these two sides flat to fit up against the router, like this.

One benefit of doing this with 3D printing, however, is that the model can be shared, so sharing a model online can help other people save time, money, and can help rescue broken things, too. If I had a broken reference part, I probably would have been more likely to make a model and share it.