 A pile of nails |
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| Classification | fastener |
|---|---|
| Used with | wood |
In woodworking and construction, a nail is a pin-shaped, object of metal (or wood called a treenail) used as a fastener, peg to hang something, or sometimes a decoration. Generally nails have a point on one end and a head on the other. Formerly wrought iron, today's nails are typically made of steel, often dipped or coated to prevent corrosion in harsh conditions or improve adhesion. Ordinary nails for wood are usually of a soft, low-carbon or "mild" steel (about 0.1% carbon, the rest iron and perhaps a trace of silicon or manganese). Nails for concrete are harder, with 0.5-0.75% carbon.
Nails are typically driven into the workpiece by a hammer, a pneumatic nail gun, or a small explosive charge or primer. A nail holds materials together by friction in the axial direction and shear strength laterally. The point of the nail is also sometimes bent over or clinched after driving to prevent falling out.
Nails are made in a great variety of forms for specialized purposes. The most common is a wire nail. Other types of nails include pins, tacks, brads, and spikes.
The history of the nail is divided roughly into three distinct periods:
To make a wrought-iron nail, iron ore was heated with carbon (to create wrought iron) and shaped into square rods. To make a nail, a blacksmith would heat the rod in a forge, taper the end of the bar while keeping the cross section square. Next, the smith would cut off the taper, and insert it into a nail heading tool with a square hole. The top of the taper would be hammered downward (upset) to create a head.
Nails go back at least to Ancient Egypt - bronze nails found in Egypt have been dated 3400 BC.
The Bible provides a number of references to nails, including the story in Judges of the wife who drives a nail into the temple of her husband while he is asleep, the provision of iron for nails by King David for Solomon's Temple, and of course the crucifixion of Christ.
The Romans made extensive use of nails. One way that we know this is that in the United Kingdom, the Roman army left behind seven tons of nails at the fortress of Inchtuthil in Perthshire.
The term “penny”, as it refers to nails, probably originated in medieval England to describe the price of 100 nails. The letter “d”, which stands for penny, is derived from the Latin name of the Roman coin, the denarius.
Until around 1800, nails were made by hand, and were provided by an artisan known as a nailer or nailor. There were workmen called slitters who cut up iron bars to a suitable size for nailers to work on. From the late 16th century, manual slitters disappeared, with the rise of the slitting mill, which cut bars of iron into rods with an even cross-section, saving much manual effort.
At the time of the American Revolution, England was the largest manufacturer of nails in the world. Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the American colonies. Families often had small nail manufacturing setups in their homes; during bad weather and at night, the entire family might work at making nails for their own use and for barter. Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter, “In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail maker.” The growth of the trade in the Thirteen Colonies was theoretically held back by the prohibition of new slitting mills in America by the Iron Act, though there is no evidence that the Act was actually enforced.
The production of wrought iron nails continued well into the 19th century, but ultimately limited to nails for purposes for which the softer cut nails were unsuitable, including horseshoe nails.
(Rofa Luver) said
From the very beginning, nails were handmade; the nail-making process was slow; and nails were relatively few and expensive. This naturally produced a desire to create machines to speed up and automate the nail-making process.
The slitting mill, introduced to England in 1590, had simplified the production of nail rods, but the real first efforts to mechanise the nail-making process itself occurred between 1790 and 1820, initially in the United States and England, when various machines were invented to automate and speed up the process of making nails from bars of wrought iron. These nails were known as cut nails or square nails because of their roughly rectangular cross section. Cut nails were one of the important factors in the increase in balloon framing beginning in the 1830s and thus the decline of timber framing with wooden joints. 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.
The cut-nail process was patented in America by Jacob Perkins in 1795 and in England by Joseph Dyer, who set up machinery in Birmingham, cutting nails from sheets of iron, making sure that the fibres of the iron ran down the nails. The Birmingham industry expanded in the following decades, but reached its greatest extent in the 1860s, after which it declined due to competition from wire nails, but the Birmingham industry survived until the outbreak of World War I.
Wire nails were also known as "French nails" for their country of origin. Belgian wire nails were beginning to compete in England in 1863. Joseph Henry Nettlefold was making wire nails at Smethwick by 1875. Over a following decades, the nail-making process was almost completely automated. Eventually the industry had machines capable of quickly producing huge numbers of inexpensive nails with little or no human intervention.
With the introduction of cheap wire nails, the use of wrought iron for nail making quickly declined, as more slowly did the production of cut nails. In the United States, in 1892 more steel-wire nails were produced than cut nails. In 1913, 90% of manufactured nails were wire nails. Nails went from being rare and precious to being a cheap mass-produced commodity.
Types of nail include:
Most countries, except the United States, 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 millimetre.
For example, finishing nail* sizes typically available from German suppliers are:
| Length | Diameter |
| mm | mm |
| 20 | 1.2 |
| 25 | 1.4 |
| 30 | 1.6 |
| 35 | 1.6 |
| 35 | 1.8 |
| 40 | 2.0 |
| 45 | 2.2 |
| 50 | 2.2 |
| 55 | 2.2 |
| 55 | 2.5 |
| 60 | 2.5 |
| 60 | 2.8 |
| 65 | 2.8 |
| 65 | 3.1 |
| 70 | 3.1 |
| 80 | 3.1 |
| 80 | 3.4 |
| 90 | 3.4 |
| 100 | 3.8 |
| 90 | 3.8 |
| 100 | 4.2 |
| 110 | 4.2 |
| 120 | 4.2 |
| 130 | 4.6 |
| 140 | 5.5 |
| 160 | 5.5 |
| 180 | 6.0 |
| 210 | 7.0 |
In the United States, the length of a nail is designated by its penny size, written with a number and the abbreviation d for penny; for example, 10d for a ten-penny nail. A larger number indicates a longer nail, shown in the table below. Nails under 1¼ inch, often called brads, are sold mostly in small packages with only a length designation or with length and wire gauge designations; for example, 1" 18 ga or 3/4" 16 ga.
Penny sizes originally referred to the price for a hundred nails in England in the 15th century: the larger the nail, the higher the cost per hundred. The system remained in use in England into the 20th century, but is obsolete there today. The d is an abbreviation for denarius, a Roman coin similar to a penny; this was the abbreviation for a penny in the UK before decimalisation.
| penny size | length (inches) |
length (nearest mm) |
|---|---|---|
| 2d | 1 | 25 |
| 3d | 1¼ | 32 |
| 4d | 1½ | 38 |
| 5d | 1¾ | 44 |
| 6d | 2 | 51 |
| 7d | 2¼ | 57 |
| 8d | 2½ | 65 |
| 9d | 2¾ | 70 |
| 10d | 3 | 76 |
| 12d | 3¼ | 83 |
| 16d | 3½ | 89 |
| 20d | 4 | 102 |
| 30d | 4½ | 115 |
| 40d | 5 | 127 |
| 50d | 5½ | 140 |
| 60d | 6 | 152 |
Nails have been used in art, such as the Nail Men - a form of fundraising common in Germany and Austria during World War I.
Before the 1850′s bocce and petanque boules were wooden balls, sometimes partially reinforced with hand-forged nails. When cheap, plentiful machine-made nails became available, manufacturers began to produce the boule cloutée - a wooden core studded with nails to create an all-metal surface. Nails of different metals and colors (steel, brass and copper) were used to create a wide variety of designs and patterns. Some of the old boules cloutées are genuine works of art and valued collectors items.
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