17.10.2014

TacWise's Z3 is a multi-function tool that could replace a minimum of three others each performing a single function and which may, individually, cost almost as much as this to buy. It is therefore an economical alternative.As a tacker it could be used when upholstering, laying carpets, underlays and similar flooring. It could also be used to help build window displays, exhibition displays or similar or even when temporarily putting up short-term decorations for a birthday or other celebration, Christmas decorations or similar.As a cable tacker, it could be used with door bell and intercom installations, and other low-voltage electrics. It could also, with the correct size of staples,be used for Ethernet installations but the tool cannot use an appropriate size of staple for some dual- or triple-shielded co-axial cables, e.g. TV and satellite signal cables. The tool should never be used with mains and higher voltage cables.The pinning and nailing functions have several probable uses including building or repairing garden trellises, a variety of DIY tasks provided that the 15mm tacks or nails will suffice. As with other such machines, they are most effective with softwoods and some fibreboards; hardwoods and other surfacing materials may be too hard for the tool to be effective. The packaging offers a several more applications in the home, garden and elsewhere where this tool may be of help, but there are potentially many others.As this is a kit, you get more than the tool. Also packed with it is an extractor which will work with the staples used by this machine and many others, regardless of their size or gauge. You also get a collection of its standard snd cable staples, and some pins and nails totalling in excess of 10,000 and in varying quantities. It is a representative collection only and does not include all possible compatible sizes of its supplies. The basic types used are usefully shown on the front of the packaging, and on the body of the tool itself should the packaging be discarded. The back of the packaging provides a complete list of all possible compatible combinations and you can buy each of them in packs of 1 or 2,000 and sometimes 5,000 or more. In the smaller quantities prices are generally a few £ each and they readily available from Amazon and others.TacWise claim that their tackers are easier to use than most others as they require a level amount of pressure from first application to firing whereas most will require progessively more pressure to be applied until the firing point is reached when it then dramatically peaks. Experience shows that this claim to be correct. The benefits, other than reduced expenditure of effort, is that it is less tiring to use for longer periods and will not, with extended session use, cause as much pain to the palm of the hand or the bruising that others can.The tool has a small function lever just above the exit point that must be raised for use with cable staples and lowered for everything else. There are no printed instructions other than basic diagrams but none are really needed provided that sensible in-use precautions are taken and there is an awareness of the possible risks of injury to the user and others should it be misused.There are two other controls, one of which is cleverly hidden. The first and more obvious is that under the operating lever and that is a pressure adjuster. You can move it to the '+' position for harder materials on which you happen to be working but the '-' position will usually suffice. The second control is a safety lock built into the operating lever. To release it, you need to firmly press the lever into the body when the slots on the lever are no longer visible. The lock should be re-engaged in-between sessions and always when not in use. Releasing the lock also allows access to the pressure adjustment lever.The tacker tool is constructed of plastics on all normally visible surfaces but they cover a metal shell. On the assumption that the materials used are similar to several other TacWise tools, it should provide several years of satisfaction in any or all of its potential uses.TacWise have done a brilliant job in presenting this kit and it is excellent value. The tool is highly adaptable to many tasks although some alternative individual tools suited to one or two of the same tasks may accept a greater size range of staples or other applicable supplies; that should be borne in mind when purchasing.

28.10.2014

The kit comes in a fairly sturdy but cardboard box and is rather heavy due to the amount of staples you get. I'd say you could store the gun and staples in the box permanently but it's not going to take the same abuse that a plastic tool case would so that would have been preferable, but not to worry.Inside the box there's a neatly arranged array of items: A bright orange staple gun, a black tool for removing staples and cable staples (but not nails - though since the nails have little or no heads, the only tool that would remove them is pliers!), and three boxes of various staples and nails.I say "various staples and nails" because the nail box comes with two types of nail, both 15mm long,one with some tiny heads and one without. The staple box comes with two sizes of staples too - 8mm and 12mm. Alas, there's only one size of cable staple.Allow me to briefly explain what a cable staple is - if you're putting some cabling up on a wall, you can buy those awful cable tack things from a hardware store that have plastic and a nail and they invariably fly off in a random direction when hitting them with a hammer, and/or you hit your thumb. You may have had a cable, sky or BT employee round to install internet and noticed they have a special gun that leaves behind these tiny metal curved things that look like croquet hoops. Those are cable staples. And sorry, that wasn't so brief!So on to performance. Loading the gun is easy but you absolutely must put the staples on the black rail but from the inside, so it's a matter of making sure they are on the correct side. There's an arrow on the black rail to illustrate this but do pay attention as you might do yourself a mischief by getting it wrong. You will know when they're in right, it "feels" correct.There's a grey lever that you have to flip upward to change to cable tacks. I have no idea what this does but I obediently flip it for cable tacks. There's also a tension lever.Cable tacks go in very easily. I would definitely test the cable tacking before using it on actual cable for fear of biting straight into the insulation and shorting the wire. This is less likely on coax cable like satellite cable of course, but on LAN or speaker cable it's a definite likelihood if you have the tension too high.Nails work fine - having only had an electric nail gun before I was hesitant but I guess the nails here are shorter. If you have a lot of nailing to do then it's a no brainer, get an electric gun, or your hands are going to seriously hurt after a while!Staples...pretty standard. The gun has a lot of whack to you have to set the tension right, but nothing to say here other than it works.The staple removal tool is also pretty nifty - it's simple but very sturdy and gives a lot more leverage than those crazy spiky teeth ones you see everywhere. I'm going to have to make a point not to lose this removal tool as it will be handy to have around.My only criticism is the lack of a case to keep all this stuff together in, but that's a very minor thing really, I just like cases.

17.10.2014

On opening the box I was surprised to find that there were no instructions.Oh well,I thought,I've used enough staplers in my life to really not need any and after a quick look at the picture on the back of the sturdy box I released the handle lock and then the magazine and loaded it with staples,which was easy enough.A quick try out with half a dozen revealed that it was light and easy to use,although it does need some effort on your part,but there's very little kick back and it has a decent punch that should be sufficient to tack most fabrics to wood,including carpeting,and would be ideal for upholstery jobs.Next I tried the cable staples.Again no problem loading it and the staples were wideand deep enough to run speaker cables or similar along a skirting board or round a door frame.My problems started when I tried loading the headless pins and the nails.Looking down at the bottom of the tool these lie flush to the wall of the left hand side of the magazine,there's a little arrow on the black loader that points to the correct side,but as a whole strip of either won't fit in you'll need to break off a section.If in doing this the strip is no longer dead flat or a section is left that is only partly attached you'll need to hold these flat against the side to be able to load them or they'll just buckle,which is what happened to me.The inclusion of a staple remover is a good idea and this one works very well as long as you make sure to push it all the way under the staple otherwise at your first attempt you might just snap part of the staple off,again I speak from experience.Once I'd figured all this out and how to unlock and lock the handle it was very easy to use and more than powerful enough for most household and many garden jobs.However,the lack of instructions made this process unnecessarily complicated,particularly locking the handle,because there's a real knack to this.UPDATE:I used this to string a set of Konstsmide Lightsets Outdoor 3612-110 19.04 m 120 Micro LED Fairy Lights(very nice) just below the roof around our conservatory.Because we didn't want the holes to be too visible when they're removed in the future rather than using the cable staples I just used the 12mm staples.The guide on the nose of the stapler was invaluable for ensuring that I didn't damage the cable and also for holding the cable in place and the staples were man enough for the job,although I did find that as I was punching them into upvc I needed to press down on the end of the stapler to stop the kickback,which was only slight but enough to stop the staples going into the upvc properly.Overall I found it to be a quick and easy job despite having to hold the cable in one hand whilst balancing on a stepladder and various bits of furniture.

26.10.2014

In the interests of disclosure, I will start by saying I don't know much about DIY. I chose this item more because I thought it would be handy for craft use, and perhaps a few basic DIY jobs round the house. So it's entirely possible that there are things about this tool which would be obvious to an enthusiast but are lost on me, and therefore this review should be read with that in mind - if you have next to zero experience using tools like this, I am speaking to you!The first thing I noticed was that there are no instructions included, just basic images on the side of the tool itself. I'm not really sure what that's about but I found it really off-putting. Yes, it is simple to use and yes,

17.11.2014

I'm not a DIY enthusiast but end up doing most of the small jobs around the house and garden, so was quite keen to try out this handy gadget. The TacWise Z3 Tacker kit is a really useful tool for all sorts of household & garden jobs. It consists of a tacker (like a large stapler), various staples, nails and pins, and a staple remover. The stapler is bright orange, and not too heavy to use with one hand. It is easy to load the staples. I found the grip very comfortable and easy to hold securely.The handle locks into a safety position - my one complaint is that it took me a while to release it, as it's quite stiff, and the instructions (little icons on the side of the stapler)

21.10.2014

This is a small, hand-powered staple gun that does the usual stapling, plus headless nails, headed nails, and low voltage cable hoops. It's fairly self explanatory with pictures on the side which take about two minutes to work out, which is a good thing, as no instructions are supplied. It comes complete with a goodly supply of each type of fixing.Headless nails (pins)For upholstery, these are great, and previously required the fiddly use of a small hammer. Don't throw the hammer away, as the size of the staple gun means you can't use it for the fiddliest corners, but it will certainly make it a breeze to put them in where you can get at things.Headed nailsThe headed nails supplied have very,

16.10.2014

The Tacwise Z3 is a a useful lightweight combination tool that accepts a variety of small fastenings, packets of which are included in the kit. The kit also includes an extractor which is a well designed strong tool capable of safely removing big heavy staples as well as the small ones inserted by this stapler.The force required to operate the stapler is not too much and in many cases will allow single handed use. The force lever (wrongly marked as a safety lever on the pack) has two settings, marked + and -, but there is not much difference. Two hands are needed with harder wood (one hand to hold the tool against the work) if one wishes the nail or pin head to be flush with the surface.It is easy to load,

7.4.2014

I was initially considering the efforts of Draper, Stanley and DIY shop own brand staplers but after reading reviews of those items, it seemed that they had their shortcomings for anything semi serious so after a suggestion in a review I read, I focused my attention on the Tacwise products.I selected the Z3 4-in-1 kit as I wanted the flexibility of having a nailer and cable stapler function as well as a normal stapler and the kit version (incl. staple pack and staple remover) was actually cheaper than the standalone version.I was curious of whether this stapler kit would be up to the task I initially needed it for, which was to secure quite dense 10mm carpet underlay but it handled it effortlessly.

3.2.2014

I generally use Tacwise and Stanley electric staplers in the garage given they share the same size staples and nails. However, I needed a cheap more portable solution for odd jobs around the garden, and opted for the Z3 4 in 1. (Tacwise Z3-140 Staple Gun Tacker is the pro version of this offering sporting better build quality yet lacks cable function )I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and power of this gun. First of all, it does come exactly as pictured ... accessories and staples included. It has more options than my other two staplers which accept just nails or standard staples.Being understandably a less powerful stapler it can also be used for cables.

29.11.2014

This is a perfectly normal, manual stapler with two very clever little innovations which make it much more useful: it can fire nails and panel pins and round headed staples.The nails (that’s the 180 series) are not large, and nor are the heads particularly wide – in some respects they are just large panel pins – 15mm long. The pins are a little slimmer, and are practically headless. They are also 15mm long – and while the company manufactures longer nails as part of the series, those would be for other, larger staple guns – 15mm is the deepest nail or staple that will go in this one. The stapler can fire them right into soft wood so that they don’t protrude at all.

17.10.2014

My use for this Tacwise Stapler might perhaps be a little different than many other buyers. As a surveyor, I often find myself out on site having to stick notices onto things like fences or garages and had been struggling for many months to find something that would help out in certain situations. The fact that this could staple onto wood and the like was a selling point for me and I'm glad that it has actually proved useful for the job I intended it for.It comes with enough staples to keep me going for years, as well as a number of different staple and nail fittings. I've been able to do things in the garden with our bird table,

26.10.2014

I've had this product 5 days and it has been fantastic in that time. Everything I was about to use a staple gun for has been achieved with this product and I am (as well as my colleagues) very impressed. I work in a small secondary school and this product was tested by 4 teachers but ultimately belongs to me much to their unhappiness. I used in my English classroom for some simple displays on an existing wood display board. It was neat tidy and easy to use. Another colleague then took it to tidy up some cables in his classroom against the big Victorian skirting board and it worked a treat for him.From here it received some tougher work and was taken to a combined work area for Design Technology and Art.

17.10.2014

Arrived today and straight into use at work! I was a little bit concerned that this stapler might not be up to the job; how wrong can you be? I had a number of cables to fix down following us changing the layout of one of our offices and moving the desks. As part of that move we had to use longer CAT5 patch leads than we required for the desks and due to the fact that the space being used is temporary, I needed to secure the cables safely using cable staples.The item did have staples in the pack, but not sufficient of the type of the type that I required, forcing a trip to a local electrical stores, but an hour after the item's arrival I had tied down the cables and sat back pleased that health and safety had not been compromised.

23.10.2014

In the box with the TackWise Z3 stapler are a very useful staple removal tool and 10,000 assorted staples and headless nails. What is missing is any form of documentation, other than sketch diagrams on the box and embossed instructions on the stapler body.The stapler is well constructed a fits nicely in the hand. Staples or nails can be loaded in the magazine on the bottom of the unit, much as with any stapler but, before use it, it is necessary to disengage the safety lock. Without instructions to guide me, this was a hit and miss operation, but I finally managed it. However, try as I might, I have not been able to re-engage it.Operation is simple and one-handed; staples are fired with a satisfying thud.

21.5.2015

It took me ages to choose the right staple gun. Everyone I asked recommended Tacwise, but they have a bewildering range of products that all seem very similar, and the prices seem to be all over the place (this 4-in-1 was cheaper than many of the single-purpose ones, for example).I settled on this one because it supports a wider range of staple sizes than all the alternatives. Even though I bought this for putting in CT60 (small curved) staples, I like keeping my options open. Indeed, they helpfully supply a range of staples/nails in the packaging to get you started, which is a nice touch.Please note that the instructions are extremely minimal - the packet just tells you to refer to the staple gun,

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