DRIVING FORCE

HAMMERFORCE WAS BORN FROM A SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE UNHAPPY WITH NAIL GUN TECHNOLOGY. CEO ANDY COSTER SAW IT HAD MUCH MORE POTENTIAL, SO TO FULFIL IT, LAUNCHED HIMSELF BACK INTO THE WORLD OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

- OLIVER FEATHERSTON

Hammerforce’s origins lie with, as CEO Andy Coster notes, what sounds like the set-up to a joke. “There was a builder, a chemical engineer and a commercial businessman. And they all walked into a pub,” he laughs. “No, no. But the three of them – the builder in particular – had some concerns about the current offering in the nail gun market – a butane-driven product, the Paslode gun, which runs on butane gas. And yes, they’re portable, but they create carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbon residues and they’re very, very inefficient as well as quite expensive to maintain.”

The solution that the three landed on was pneumatics, but with an important difference. Typical pneumatic nail guns require long hoses to feed the compressed air from a separate compressor. Cleaner than butane, to be sure, but still inefficient and cumbersome to use.

“What these guys wanted to do was to find a way to cut the cord to be able to get all the benefits of the air technology, with the advantage of portability,” Andy explains. “It forced them to find a different way to use very high-pressure compressed air, a way that no-one had ever done before.”

This new technology employs a unique method of using highly compressed gas, and while it could also use a variety of gases such as CO 2 or nitrogen, air is cleaner. The compressed air serves as an alternative power source for mechanical devices in place of combustion, pneumatics, hydraulics, batteries or electricity, and it carries vast potential for countless industrial applications.