Why does a stapler have two different "settings"?

"Pinning mode" is used to temporarily fasten items to cloth or clothing for sewing. The outward bent staple can be easily removed by pulling it along the plane of the paper.

That makes perfect sense to me. Can that be used instead of straigh pins to hold a template to cloth?

(if so I wish I had known this a year ago)

er...pattern. not template

yes, that's exactly what it was designed for but it never really caught on.

If they would publicize that ....

lol Thanks!

I've been sewing for 52 years, and I've never realized what a clever function my stapler had! Thanks for the explanation, billnria!

Yes. Honestly next time I go to make a costume, this should save a ton of time. You deserve an award my friend!

Yes. this is true. I use this feature all the time.

I thought it was for fastening cheques to paper work in order not to rip them – well in the office enviroment it is…..

According to stapler makers, that little-used groove is for the sniveling hordes who lack the decisiveness of your circle of friends. When your pals hook together a wad of papers, they mean business. They use the channel that double-bends the staple and clenches the points toward the middle and back into the wad itself. The other setting, the one that splays the staple points outward, is for temporarily attaching papers that are intended to be separated again. The attachment is looser, and it’s easier to remove the staple without chewing up the corners of the pages.

Before the advent of mechanical staplers, papers were often hooked together with a seamstress’s ordinary straight pin—a thin metal shaft, sharpened at one end and with some sort of stopper at the other. That mysterious alternate setting on a mechanical stapler is a holdover from the straight-pin days. In fact, in the insider lingo of the desk-stapler professional, you’re stapling papers if you use the common setting, but you’re pinning them if you use the temporary setting. The base plate is called the anvil. Strangely enough, the little grooves in the anvil themselves don’t have names, as far as I can discover. Are professional design engineers reduced to referring to them as the little staple-bender-groove thingies? Hard to imagine. But since they’ve remained unchanged since the dawn of staplerdom, there’s probably not much reason to refer to them at all…