Dave -- I used a Kadee spiker to lay the track on my last two layouts. The first one had 600 feet of main line; the second about half that. After some practice, the spiker worked great for me. It had a head for code 100 rail, but it worked OK for code 83 as well, with no modifications.
That said, I would be very skeptical of using a Kadee spiker these days. The reason is that the main body of the spiker is subject to metal fatigue. My spiker body began losing chunks of metal close to the stapling head, and finally gave up the ghost when enough metal chunked out to make the spiker unusable. Fortunately, I had nearly completed the trackwork on my second layout by the time this happened. The spiker actually removes the top portion of a staple as it drives the remaining L-shaped legs of the staple into your tie. Decades ago, OSHA outlawed the spiker because it ejects tiny staple pieces at high speed each time the spiker is squeezed. After that, Kadee offered replacement parts, but discontinued sales of complete spikers. You could of course buy enough parts to assemble your own spiker, but it would cost about three times the original retail price of a complete unit. The result of all this is that all Kadee spiker bodies are at least 25 years old. The body is a zamac-like casting that crystallizes over time, either because of metal fatigue or minute amounts of lead in the original alloy. The fracture surface has a crystalline appearance, which suggests that either or both might be the case. However, fatigue is probably the culprit. At 40 ties per foot, with spikes in every fourth tie, that's 20 firings of the spiker for every foot of track laid. Because of turnouts, which require closer spiking, I'll up that to an average of 25 firings per foot. I figure that I have laid around 2000 feet of track on my two layouts with the spiker, which equates to around 50,000 firings of the spiker -- enough "load cycles" for almost any metal to fail from fatigue. Bottom line: Any Kadee spiker is likely to fail if it has been used by its previous owner(s). Beware! Dick Karnes
