Construction Nail

What is a construction nail and where is it used?

A construction nail is made by drawing wire from wire rod and then upsetting the head and pointing the tip, and it is the most basic fastener there is for timber joints. On site the heaviest use by far is formwork: fixing shuttering boards to one another, waling and brace connections, scaffold platform boards, roof timbers, packaging and crate manufacture, temporary partitions and shear wall shuttering.

The nails we supply are galvanized and are sold by the kilogram. Selling by weight has nothing to do with the price of a single nail being absurdly small; it is because sites track consumption by weight. We sell the product from our base in Ostim and ship to all 81 provinces of Turkey. You can combine other weight-based building materials such as rebar into the same order.

Nails are one of the hardest items on a site to keep track of. As formwork is struck, some of them bend, some stay buried in the boards and some drop to the ground and vanish. Order quantities should therefore be set not from a theoretical calculation alone, but alongside the real consumption figures recorded on previous jobs. Buying by weight is practical for exactly that reason: you can follow total consumption, wastage included, through a single number.

Nail lengths held in stock and technical data

We hold three lengths. The choice is not arbitrary; it follows directly from the thickness of the timber being joined.

Wire diameter changes with length; a longer nail is drawn from thicker wire. One kilogram therefore yields a great many 5 cm nails and far fewer 10 cm ones. When you order, working out how many nails you need rather than how many kilograms will give you a more reliable figure.

Selling by weight has one further consequence: what you commit to on the order is a weight, not a piece count. Because of production tolerance on wire diameter, two batches of the same length can yield slightly different numbers of nails. On jobs where the count is critical, packaging and crate manufacture for instance, always build a safety margin into your figures.

How many nails are there in a kilogram?

You can estimate the weight of a single nail with this formula: weight (grams) = 0.006165 x wire diameter² (mm) x length (mm). Add roughly 5% to the result to allow for the head. Then divide 1000 grams by that value to get the count per kilogram.

For example, if a 7 cm nail is made from 3.4 mm wire: 0.006165 x 11.56 x 70 = 4.99 grams, or about 5.2 grams once the head is allowed for. 1000 / 5.2 = roughly 190 nails per kilogram. The same method produces these working bands in practice: around 450-500 pieces per kilogram in 5 cm nails, 180-200 in 7 cm nails and 75-85 in 10 cm nails. The values shift with wire diameter and production tolerance and should not be written into a contract.

An example shows what the calculation is worth on the ground. A 25 kilogram order of 10 cm nails works out at 25 x 80 = roughly 2,000 nails. The same 25 kilograms in 5 cm nails would come to about 12,000. That sixfold gap also explains why length has to be picked carefully: reaching for a longer nail than the job needs quietly multiplies the cost per fixing.

How many kilograms of nails does a formwork job take?

The most practical way to take off the quantity is to count fixing points. Assume an average of 2 nails per shuttering board joint, find the total number of joints, then divide by the pieces-per-kilogram ratio above.

For example, at roughly 25 nails per square metre across 400 m² of formwork face you need 10,000 nails in total. If they are all 7 cm, 10,000 / 190 comes to about 53 kilograms. Where formwork is struck and reused, part of the nails bend and are lost; site experience says put 10-15% on the calculation for wastage. Do not forget that allowance when you round the order up.

Choosing a length: how deep should the nail go?

The general rule is that the nail should be at least two and a half times the thickness of the upper member, which means two thirds of it sits in the piece underneath. For a 2 centimetre board a 5 cm nail is enough; on a 3 centimetre shuttering board 7 cm is the right choice. Heavy timber, braces and roof timber joints call for 10 cm.

Using a longer nail than the job needs is not only wasteful, it is dangerous: the point breaks through the back, causing injuries during stripping and splitting the shuttering board. A nail that is too short will not hold the joint and the formwork opens up under concrete pressure. Length is therefore a safety question rather than an economic one.

The driving angle affects holding power as well. On joints that will see withdrawal loads, driving the nails slightly skewed and at opposing angles gives markedly better resistance to pull-out than driving them straight. In formwork, straight driving is usually preferred so that stripping stays easy, and the head is not sunk flush with the board face but left proud enough for a wrecking bar to grip.

What the galvanized coating actually does

A galvanized coating delays rust staining on jobs where the nail meets damp and rain. Exposed formwork, roof voids, garden timber and scaffold platforms all call for a coated nail, because a nail that rusts loses its grip and leaves black staining in the timber.

The hammer blow landing on the head damages the coating a little, and that is normal. What matters is that the coating on the shank stays intact. The same galvanizing logic applies to the tying products: galvanized wire and annealed wire. Annealed wire is uncoated, bends easily and belongs in short-life ties.

Storage and handling on site

Do not leave nails out in the open in direct contact with the ground. Once the box or bag splits, nails take up moisture, clump together and let the hammer slip off the head. Storing them on a pallet, covered and dry, is all it takes.

The thing to watch in use is the hardness of the timber. In hard, seasoned stock the nail can split the grain as it travels; keep the fixing at least two centimetres in from the edge, or drill a pilot hole. Forcing a bent nail straight and driving it again is not advisable where formwork safety is concerned.

Nails also behave differently according to the moisture content of the timber. Green, wet stock takes a nail easily, but as it dries and shrinks the grip slackens, so temporary formwork built in wet timber needs more fixings per joint. Seasoned hard timber is the reverse: driving is difficult but holding power is high. That is why the same job consumes different amounts of nails in timber at two different moisture levels.

What sets the price of construction nails?

Underneath the price sits the cost of wire rod; a nail is a wire rod product that has been through drawing, heading and coating. The second item is the labour of galvanizing and the cost of zinc. The third is output per length: the same tonnage in short, thin nails means producing far more pieces, which pushes up machine cycle time.

Order quantity, packaging type and delivery distance are added on top of that. All our prices include VAT and exclude carriage. Current figures appear in the price table on this page; because steel raw material is priced by the tonne and moves constantly, we do not quote figures in the body text.

Packaging type is worth weighing up too. On small quantities boxed packaging is easier to handle; on large site orders, bagged or sacked delivery is both cheaper and leaves less packaging waste behind. Tell us the quantity and we will settle the right packaging option with you.

Ordering, delivery and site survey

To place an order, all you need to give us is the length and the quantity in kilograms. If you are not sure how much the job takes, send us the formwork area or the number of joints and we will work the quantity out with you using the calculation above. The site survey is free within Ankara; on large site orders, seeing the requirement in person stops the wrong length being bought.

Delivery is charged under all circumstances. Carriage is added to the order on shipments within Ankara as well and is never rolled into the product price on any consignment; we confirm the amount by weight and distance before you order. Installation is not a standard service, our company sells the product and ships it. Our teams attend site only on perimeter projects of approximately 1000 metres and above.