Another nail puller...The best yet?

 
When Michael Foley bought a house in Idaho there was ugly shag carpet stapled to the walls of the basement wreck room.  Five minutes into the job of removing the thousands of staples that held the shag in place, Foley knew he didn't have the right tool for the job. So he went out to his shop and started work on what would become the Nail Hunter--a tool that looks like the result of a roll in the hay (or on the shag carpet) between a cat's paw and a pair of pliers.

In the past several months, I've reviewed two nail pulling devices, one that worked well and had an awesome name and another that was stupidly expensive. Foley commented on both of my blogs, suggesting, in effect,  that if I really wanted to get serious about pulling nails, I should try a Nail Hunter. OK, cowboy, I thought (assuming that everyone in Idaho was a cowboy but later finding out that Foley grew up in Newmarket, NH) send me one of your tools and I'll try it out.

Foley sent the 8.5-inch-long Nail Hunter and the 11-inch-long Nail Jack. These babies really work! I used them to pull 16d common nails out of ornery, dry, nailed-together, pressure-treated 2X stock that had been lying in the scrap heap behind the shed for years. The nails came right out of the boards. One of the cool features is the small anvil behind the hinged and pointed jaws: Smack the anvil with your hammer to drive the jaws into the wood, then squeeze the handles to grab the nail and roll it out with the tool's curved base.  (Watch the video here to get a real good idea of how these work.) I also yanked some staples out of a fence post, and I pulled finish nails through the back of some door casings. Later today, I'm going to try pulling ticks off the cats.  If I had lots of nails to pull, these are the tools I'd reach for, and they cost a lot less than a titanium cat's paw!