Fasco GN-40A Brad Nailer: Discontinued — What to Buy Instead
An Italian-made brad nailer with patchy distribution. Effectively unavailable now, and the category has moved on.
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Fasco is an Italian fastening manufacturer whose tools have always reached English-speaking markets through industrial distributors rather than retail, and availability has varied by country and by year. The GN-40A is not a tool you can readily buy now.
Rather than chase it, the useful question is what makes a good 18-gauge brad nailer, because they are all superficially the same.
The nose is what separates them
A brad nailer’s contact nose has to reach into a corner. The older pattern has a wide nose with a safety contact ring around the driver, which means the nail can only be placed some distance from an obstruction — awkward when you are pinning a moulding into an internal corner.
Bostitch’s Smart Point design, on the tool scored here, shrinks the contact area to a point at the nail position. You place the tip exactly where the nail should go, and it fires without needing to compress a wide ring against the surface.
Tool-free everything
Three things should not need a spanner: depth adjustment, jam clearing, and the no-mar tip.
Depth adjustment gets used constantly, because the right depth in pine is too deep in oak. A dial is right; a spanner means people leave it set wrong.
Jams happen with brads more than any other fastener, because they are thin and bend. A latch that opens the nose without tools turns a jam from a job into a pause.
Check the fasteners
18-gauge brads are standard, but lengths supported vary — most take 5/8 in to 2 in. Make sure the tool covers the lengths you use, and buy brads in a brand you can get locally.
Do you want 18 gauge?
An 18-gauge brad leaves a small hole and holds light trim. A 16-gauge finish nail holds more and leaves a bigger hole; a 23-gauge pin leaves almost no hole and holds almost nothing.
Most shops end up with an 18-gauge brad nailer and a 23-gauge pinner, and reach for the pinner more often than they expect for holding parts while glue cures.