Have an old house, circu 1880's, when then or later canvas was hung in rooms and wall paper hung on canvas. The canvas was nailed to the walls of the room & nails are very difficult to remove. Help! Thought a magnet would suffice to run across the wall boards???
magnet to remove nails in walls
Mar 27, 2021
Last reply: 5 years ago
7 Replies
If they are hard to remove with a claw hammer, you would need a room sized magnet to remove them. If they do have a good head on them, and using a "crow bar" still does work, then consider just pounding them in flat.
What is the goal? You usually have two options. You can often pount them in further and spackle the indent left, or, pull them out and spackle the hole it left.
If you pull them out use a tool to pry them and put a thin piece of metal or wood behind the tools so it does not dig in.
Magnet will do nothing but could help you locate them.
"Run across" is very ambiguous. Your meaning is clear from your subject line, but I and some others often don't read subject lines. Would you write something for school or publication and put one of the essential points only in the title and not in the body?
Grampy and Ed are both right. As to crowbars, there is something between a claw hammer and what I learned to think of as the primo crowbar. Here is one:
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More powerful than a hammer, but not heavy enough to put accidental dents in your wall, if you put a piece of metal or wood underneath as Ed said.
As a teenager, my dad bought abandoned houses and we deconstructed them to reclaim and sell the lumber. A proper nail puller was essential. Ours looked like this one.
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The "slide hammer" handle lets you dig in just the right amount, allowing you to get under the head and grab it. I must have pulled 10,000 nails with one of these tools during my young years, many of them the old square variety. It felt like 10,000 anyway. We even sold the nails, not just the lumber, and this tool pulls them pretty much straight out without bending or damaging them. It's fast and easy to use.
My husband recommends a Binford 2000 nail gun, set on "reverse".
Cindy Hamilton
Your husband knows his stuff.
On Sun, 28 Mar 2021 04:58:40 -0700 (PDT), snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com posted for all of us to digest...
Nah, it's always a Binford 6100 except for two items...
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