Brand

Bostitch Roofing Nailers

The lightest pro-grade coil nailer on the market — and the gun most production crews still reach for first.

If you ask ten roofers over forty what their first nail gun was, six of them will say a Bostitch. The RN46 series has been in continuous production, with running improvements, since the early 1990s — that kind of longevity in a tool category isn't an accident. It's the result of a magazine that almost never jams, a profile that fits between rafters without rotating the wrist, and a 2.6 lb body weight that nobody else has matched without sacrificing durability.

The current RN46-1 takes 15-degree wire collated coil nails from 3/4" to 1-3/4". Operating pressure runs 70 to 120 PSI, which means it pairs comfortably with anything from a small hot-dog compressor on a residential tear-off to a wheelbarrow twin-tank running multiple guns on a production crew.

Where Bostitch shines

+Lightest body weight in the pro pneumatic category
+Magazine geometry that virtually never jams on quality coils
+Carbide insert nose lasts 5x longer than the steel nose on cheap clones
+Side-load magazine speeds reloads vs rear-load designs
+Affordable parts — driver blade replacements run in the budget tier

Things to watch

−No cordless option in the current Bostitch roofing line
−Older RN46 units (pre-2015) had a known O-ring failure point — check seller condition carefully on used buys
−Chinese-market clones using the Bostitch name exist on overseas marketplaces; buy from authorized U.S. dealers

The Bostitch story

Bostitch traces its roots to 1896, when Thomas Briggs founded the Boston Wire Stitcher Company in Arlington, Massachusetts to manufacture wire-stapling machines for the printing industry. The name shortened to "Bostitch" in 1948. The company moved into pneumatic fastening in the 1950s and was acquired by Stanley Works in 1986.

The roofing nailer line came directly out of Bostitch's industrial stapler heritage — the same magazine and driver mechanics that worked for box-stitching machines scaled up neatly to coil nail collation. The RN45 (now retired) launched in the late 1980s and was replaced by the RN46 series in the early 1990s.

Today Bostitch sits inside Stanley Black & Decker alongside DeWalt, Porter-Cable, and Craftsman. Roofing nailers are still designed in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, with manufacturing split between U.S. and Asian facilities depending on the SKU.