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SDConcrete forming stakes: Metal vs Wood👇
While metal stakes could save you money through reusability, I’ve grown to dislike them over the past 15+ years of forming footings. Here is MY personal beef with them:
- Hand nailing takes time and effort. Not easy to do solo when you’re also trying to hold a laser receiver on a stick and lift and nail the footing to elevation. I only have two hands.
- Lining up the nail holes and driving a nail through them when they’re packed full of old concrete is a real pain.
- They sink right through clay and gravel, offering next to zero vertical support. Driving a stake, finding out it’s too short, and grabbing a longer one it is not efficient.
- They don’t really pierce through hardpan much better than wood stakes, and if they don’t stay upright until I get to lift the footing and nail them, they’ll flop right over. No amount of gravel kicked up against them will keep them upright.
- Storing, transporting, and hauling bundles of these heavy suckers just adds insult to injury when I already don’t like using them. My time is valuable.
Yes, wood stakes do cost more (ultimately, the builder pays for this), but I’m far more efficient when using them, so the cost easily evens out.
- Being able to use a framing nailer makes one person footing lifts a breeze.
- The extra surface area usually helps prevent wood stakes from disappearing when staking in clay or gravel.
- I can kick gravel up against the stake to keep it upright if I can’t drive it into hardpan or 3” minus structural fill.
- They are extremely light. I can carry a larger number of these to place around a footing than I can metal stakes, which means less walking especially when I have hundreds of these to place.
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