Everyone knows what a hassle it is to hammer nails. Always smashing your fingers. Ouch. You also might know what a hassle it is to go over a floor or deck which may have thousands of nails, and knock all of them below the surface so you can apply putty for a nice finish.

In comes my idea. Firstly you have to hammer the nails in. But you can leave the head sticking out.

You basically get a very strong spring connected to a nail punch in a hand held gunlike device, which has either an electric or pneumatic method of loading (cocking?) the spring. You pull a trigger to fire the punch, and when you let go, it reloads. Semi-auto style.

At the pointy end, you attach a small flat piece of steel with a "V" shape cut into it to enable you to quickly and easily locate the tool around the head of the protruding nail head. The punch fires through the base of the "V", directly on to the nail head.

Force can be adjusted by adjusting the spring tension, and depth could be adjusted by a screw type setting stop on the punch shaft.
-- JoeyJoJoShabadoo, Oct 21 2005

random, halfbakery