We wrote about Craftsman’s Hammerhead “Auto-Hammer” way back in 2008. Our initial take: It was an interesting solution to a pretty rare problem. When came in possession of one a good bit later, we were surprised to discover that it worked as advertised. (For those of you not familiar, a small anvil inside the hole you see on the head drives a nail with hundreds of short but powerful blows. It feels a little like a pneumatic palm nailer, but it’s battery powered and — as we mentioned back in ’08 — features a much different shape.) But we just couldn’t see it as a serious solution for driving thousands of nails. Rather, we suspected it would find a home more as a specialty tool for tasks like, say, driving a nail in between studs or in other tight spaces.
Enter now the updated version, the Hammerhead G2, pictured above. What, you ask, might they add? Try a light. And a rotating head.
Which actually makes a lot of sense, right? The whole point of this thing, at least as we see it, is for driving nails in hard-to-reach places. So anything they can do to make it more space-flexible seems like a good idea to us. If anything, the rotating head would seem to indicate that Craftsman has finally dropped their vision of a guy in a flannel shirt building a deck with the damn thing and instead accepted the tool’s clear role as problem-solver. Check out the pic they include on the Craftsman site (link below), which shows a guy reaching above his head to drive a nail in what looks like a basement ceiling.
So the bad news: It’s still waaaaay too expensive. $90 seems like too big an ask for a specialty tool that’ll only exit the toolbox on rare occasions. Of course, it’s those specialty tools that (as we’ve pointed out many times) save your ass. Or arm.
What do you think?
NEXTEC 12V G2 Hammerhead [Craftsman]
Street Pricing [Google]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]