Staples and Their guns.

The other day, my Black & Decker PowerShot staple gun failed to reset, again.  Usually banging it on the side of the table would do the trick, but not this time.  I banged and banged to no avail.  I checked for jams.  There were none to be found.  It was broken.

I decided to take it apart and see if I could find something loose or broken and easily replaced.  This failed.  As soon as I removed the last screw and separated the halves of the case it went all splody sending several parts around the room, propelled by the springs inside.  So be it.  Repairability was a long shot on something this cheap.  There is always a trade off to be made between initial manufacturing cost and repairability.  When something is cheap the balance usually leans towards low manufacturing cost.  I had already resolved to buy a new one if I couldn't fix this one, so I wasn't too upset.

You'd think this would be an easy enough endeavor—You'd think.  I went to Target and picked up a Stanley TR45 and some staples.  I was only planning to staple some thin polyethylene tubes so I didn't need a heavy duty model.  The one thing I liked about this was that you could open it to clear jams.

The packaging said it took JT21 staples so that's what I bought, but he damn things didn't fit.  They were slightly too narrow to fit on the rail upon which they slide.  Figuring I just got a bad batch of staples I went to my Local Ace hardware and bought another box from another manufacturer.  They didn't fit either.

So the staple gun was the one that was mis-made.

What the Fuck!  These are staples and staple guns, not mechanical watches.  The tolerances aren't that tight. Cheap Chinese manufacturing shouldn't be a factor here.  If I were stapling up a tarp to hide a camp fire from the ravenous undead, I'd have been fucked.

Since burning the gas to return it would cost almost as much as the thing costs I decided to try to fix it by bending in the edges of the rail.  This didn't work so I just threw it away.

I then went back to my local Ace and bought an Arrow T50 because the box claimed it took the same size staples I already bought and it was made in the U.S.  It worked fine.

The poorly made staple gun was bad enough but why isn't there an industry standard for staple sizes?  There is for the office type paper staplers.  ISO has standards for pretty much everything else.  Seriously, if it can be measured ISO probably has a standard for it.  As an American I know that the standard sized staples wouldn't be available to me since they would be metric, but the more things that have an international metric standard, the more pressure there is for the U.S. to finally get with it.

When the dead rise to mack on our brainy goodness we are going to need to do a lot of improvisation.   We are not going to have the luxury of making return trips to the deserted hardware stores for consumables of just the right dimensions or dealing with tools that can't even do what they are manufactured to do.