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Staple Guns

Does what it says on the tin
Stompa
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Staple Guns

#333001

Postby Stompa » August 13th, 2020, 8:01 pm

I'm toying with the idea of reupholstering an office chair, something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n89WJUe0N0c

However, to do so I will need to get a staple gun (which I know nothing about). Now the problem is that the construction of my chair is a little different to the one in the video. Whilst on the seat the fabric is stapled on to a wood backing, on the back of the chair it's stapled on to a (hardish?) plastic backing.

So will a heavy duty manual staple gun, e.g.

https://www.screwfix.com/p/stanley-heav ... -gun/62930

be sufficiently powerful enough to drive a staple into the plastic?

Thanks

Itsallaguess
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Re: Staple Guns

#333004

Postby Itsallaguess » August 13th, 2020, 8:14 pm

Stompa wrote:
So will a heavy duty manual staple gun, e.g.

https://www.screwfix.com/p/stanley-heav ... -gun/62930

be sufficiently powerful enough to drive a staple into the plastic?


As an owner of a similar staple gun to the one linked, I'd have said that it would, and having just read the fourth customer review on your Screwfix link above, that seems to be confirmed by how the reviewer was able to complete his 'Job 2' with the above stapler -

Image

Given the above, and so long as your plastic sheeting is not as tough as thin tin, then I'd imagine it'll do the job fine...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Stompa
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Re: Staple Guns

#333162

Postby Stompa » August 14th, 2020, 11:44 am

Itsallaguess wrote:Image

Given the above, and so long as your plastic sheeting is not as tough as thin tin, then I'd imagine it'll do the job fine...

Thanks, but it's not plastic sheeting, it's fabric being stapled on to solid plastic. They've used staples on the original, but my worry is that perhaps they only managed to achieve that using an industrial strength staple gun.

There seem to be various reports online about it being difficult or even impossible, e.g.

https://thumpertalk.com/forums/topic/27 ... t-plastic/

so I'm beginning to think buying a staple gun for this would be a waste of time.

Stompa
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Re: Staple Guns

#333164

Postby Stompa » August 14th, 2020, 11:46 am

Snorvey wrote:My staple gun goes into most things alright but occasionally I have to get a hammer just to finish off driving the staples in.

Thanks, the difficulty here is that the surface into which I would be stapling would have seat padding behind it which would probably make hammering (and stapling) problematic.

bungeejumper
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Re: Staple Guns

#333228

Postby bungeejumper » August 14th, 2020, 4:04 pm

I tend to agree that a staple gun won't have enough oomph to drive straight into deep/solid plastic. Mine's pretty good but it won't do that, and if it did I'd be worried about cracking/splitting the plastic.

If there's no way that glue would do it, then I suspect you might be down to drilling and screwing, with very small short screws and screw cup washers (with or without caps). Not easy to keep the tension right on the fabric, though. Interested to hear which solution you go for.

BJ

Stompa
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Re: Staple Guns

#333243

Postby Stompa » August 14th, 2020, 5:04 pm

bungeejumper wrote:I tend to agree that a staple gun won't have enough oomph to drive straight into deep/solid plastic. Mine's pretty good but it won't do that, and if it did I'd be worried about cracking/splitting the plastic.

If there's no way that glue would do it, then I suspect you might be down to drilling and screwing, with very small short screws and screw cup washers (with or without caps). Not easy to keep the tension right on the fabric, though. Interested to hear which solution you go for.

Thanks, in the end I took a chance and bought a staple gun, this one:

https://www.toolstation.com/rapid-all-s ... ler/p83882

which happened to have a review saying "Used this to fit a new seat cover to a motorbike seat, previously had problems with another stapler where the staples collapsed rather than penetrate the hard plastic seat, but this one worked faultlessly".

Fortunately they're right, it works a treat I don't know what I was worried about!

Itsallaguess
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Re: Staple Guns

#333280

Postby Itsallaguess » August 14th, 2020, 6:53 pm

Stompa wrote:
Thanks, but it's not plastic sheeting, it's fabric being stapled on to solid plastic. They've used staples on the original, but my worry is that perhaps they only managed to achieve that using an industrial strength staple gun.


Ah!

I'm not sure why, but I imagined when you said 'hardish plastic backing', I imagined a thinner plastic sheeting on the chair-rear, under the fabric, but over the underlying wood, and not a full plastic 'section', but now having re-read your OP, what you're now describing makes much more sense.

Great that you managed to get going with the stapler you've purchased though, and another tick in the box for these types of user-reviews being useful too, if you got to the Toolstation solution via one of their reviews that talked about an almost exact situation to your own. I make great use of the various user-review sections when looking out for these types of purchases, and the Toolstation and Screwfix ones are very often well-considered reviews giving some great technical and real-world-use information...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess


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