My cheap plastic knee kicker cost me 3 extra hours on a 12x15 in Fresno

Mia Perez · 2026-10-17T15:30:04.200751+00:00

Everyone in here swears by the fancy $200 kickers but I figured my $40 one worked fine for the last two years. Last week I took a 12x15 berber job in Fresno and the thing kept slipping off the tackless strip because the head had worn smooth, so I was re-seating it every third hit. What should have been a 3 hour stretch turned into almost 6 hours of me cussing and redoing a seam I messed up. I finally dug out an old beat up kicker from the truck with a real metal head and the whole thing went down in 20 minutes. I get why folks say buy once cry once now, but nobody ever says the cheap ones go soft slow so you don't notice until a big room eats your whole afternoon. What's the tell that yours is done for, wobble in the head or the pad going flat first?

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My cheap plastic knee kicker cost me 3 extra hours on a 12x15 in Fresno | Carpet Installers - The Community Guide