Stretching Pre-Primed Canvas

[Tony Pro]

Or you guys can just use stainless steel staples and call it a day!!!
Richard Schmid uses cheep staples and varnishes them so they don't rust...

Beats cracking your fingers under a tack hammer!

[Julie Deane]

I'll second Tony on the stainless steel staples. Regular staples rust.
The staple gun is a wonderful invention! I can handle the canvas stretcher tool and the stapler, and do the whole thing myself (but not six foot canvases!).

I would assume that one purpose of the copper tacks is to look pretty for the client?

[Debra Norton]

My husband and I stretch my canvases together. One of the problems we had using a staple gun (electric) was the varying hardness of the stretchers. Sometimes the wood was so hard the staple would not go in all the way or it would be too soft and the staple would go too far and cut the canvas. We couldn't tell what to expect, even on the same stretcher bar, because sometimes the wood is pieced. So we switched to tacks and it works much better.