Harbor Freight Deal Alerts & Discussion Thread

There’s actually a lot of interesting tales of humor and woe to share about a good many HF tools and their unfortunate/angry owners. There was once a long running thread on a tool site where professionals rated several of their tools, but I cant find it now. It was enough to make you want to carpet bomb all of their stores to save our fellow Americans from extreme disappointment! :Sp For those who live outside the US, consider yourself lucky to have not been lured by the low prices and free junk they give away to hustle you in.

How about those brand new HF hydraulic floor jacks (yes, there’s more than one) that collapse over on themselves, or blow hydraulic seals while lifting far less than their rated capacity. They are a great tool for dropping that car back to earth in a hurry! While I was testing one of their aluminum quick lift jacks in their parking lot (the heavy duty version of the 2 they offered), I jacked my car up to the jacks unimpressive maximum height and then watched it crumple over on itself, dropping my car at an angle and pinning the twisted jack between the diff and pavement. Thankfully, the damn thing didnt damage one of the 2 fuel tanks it swiped on its way to oblivion. The manager and I had a good hard laugh and went back into the store to drag out their largest model to retrieve the POS HF jack my car had flattened beneath it. Just as the large 4 ton jack began to clear the car of the twisted jack, a seal gave way and dropped the car again onto the broken jack! By that time, we had quite a large crowd of hysterical people surrounding us, all laughing and exchanging stories about how crappy their prior HF tool purchases had been. Seems that I was just one of the many stories of eminent HF peril. :smiley: We ultimately extracted the twisted jack while using two smaller floor jacks, one to each side of my car to lift in unison. BTW, the car weighs only 3020 lbs total, and the jacks were attempting to lift about half that weight. HF = PURE GARBAGE!!! :bigsmile: …or rubbish, if you prefer!

If you want some real laughs, spend some time talking with the store manager about the products in the store. Then you’ll quickly learn that most of their inventory should have be shipped directly to a landfill to save customers the grief of many disappointments and product returns. For even more laughs, ask to check the back room for returned tools. There, you will find vast piles of many twisted wrenches and pliers, split sockets, grenaded electric and pneumatic tools, drill bits that didnt survive the 100th revolution, dozens of junky broken plastic and metal rubbish of every possible type, color, shape and size. Then walk the store and you’ll recognize a good amount of it in the returned broken tools room! Now I know what tools were used to assemble a lot of my trashy chinese flashlights! You know… the ones where a disgruntled monkey didnt properly thread a hole in a pill before attempting to drive a phillips screw to affix the MCPCB to the floor plate. So in its anger, it applied brute force to the point that the threads got completely stripped out and the cheap dull screwdriver rounded out the top of the screw! :smiley: Give that monkey a rotten banana and a good hard kick in the pants! :smiley:

I also have 4 or 5 of their free DMM’s they gave away to sucker me into checking out their store. While comparing DCV, each of them read totally different of one another… go figure!

How about the IR temp guns? I saw a guy using a snap-on version at the airport and thought it would be a good idea, especially for air cooled engines. Lessons learned from the crappy DMM’s had me suspicious, so I opened up several boxes to compare the IR guns. Each gun read vastly different of one another! PURE HF GARBAGE AGAIN! :smiley: I should have known.

You’re probably safe using items such as hammers or T-squares (maybe, but dont count on it). Screw drivers? Forget it! Ive broken and chipped tips off most of them before they were thrown into the garbage can where they belong. The round shafts of the cheap mild steel large drivers have been useful for roll forming micro chips out of aluminum aircraft propeller blades. So I will give them that as being remotely useful as a tool. Especially if you’re working on a float plane at dock and accidentally drop the driver into the water. Not to worry, it wasnt even with the plastic package it came in when it was brand new! Plus, you wont have to lug it back to the tool box to loath looking at it again in the future!

Then there’s the 12 volt trickle charger to keep your car battery topped off. What a piece of junk! It should have been called a battery cooker! A friend had one and it cooked an expensive new car battery dry of all its electrolyte in less than 2 months. MORE HF RUBBISH! I’ll blast it into small metal fragments with my 44 mag this spring to put it out of its misery.

I wouldnt doubt if most of their stuff is made in the same awful plants as Ridgid, Workforce, Kobalt, Husky and most of the other junky tools most of us have so easily destroyed or become ashamed of owning… while ruining much of the work it was intended to assist us with! :bigsmile:

Sure, there are some things that might pass muster… that is, if youre very desperate to save a buck in order to stretch your shameless aff-link shill payments that you’ve scrounged through BLF from all your unscrupulous lying chinese employers from across the pond. :Sp Just dont purchase anything that: lifts or supports weight, plugs into an electrical wall outlet or compressed air supply, used to apply torque or carries with it a cheap or questionable appearance! And NO! Just becasue you’ve babied a cheap tool to accomplish a meager amount of work and never put it to the test - does not qualify you to say its something you should recommend to the masses, becasue its not! :smiley: Its a cheap POS tool that will probably fail you miserably at some point, and at the worse possible time… and you wont have anything else to finish the job because you cheaped out when you knew you shouldnt have! Man, you’re really screwed now, arent cha? :bigsmile: :smiley: Give yourself a rotten banana and kick in the pants!!! :stuck_out_tongue: At least you’ve still got your BLF shill links to beg an 8% commission, so press on!

BTW, I also remember laughing at a large pile of returned broken strap wrenches at HF. The same ones that most of us had bought at one time or another… then subsequently broken! :smiley: Its been about 4 years since Ive visited a HF. I still get their colorful coupon flier in the mail. Its printed on a slightly heavier stock than others but doesnt burn worth a darn, so its useless in lighting my fire place! So I drop it in my paper recycling bin, along with all the other unworthy junk mail that never makes it into my home!!! :smiley: :smiley:

Later on, I’ll make you all suffer through a story of pain, loathing and expense that a cheap $100 HF bore scope cost an aircraft owner when he used that utter piece of crap to examine his cylinder bores and valves. That, after using his fancy looking POS HF compression tester that lied becasue it didnt give consistent repeatable compression pressure readings with his car engine! You think he would have learned! And then there’s the guy that ripped his forearm completely open and required several reconstructive surgeries and 3+ years of agonizing physical therapy when an HF wrench broke while turning a bolt to became his worst enemy.

In many cases, the dollars you might save in cheapo tools will cost you MANY, MANY times that amount… and you still wont have a tool to do the job properly, so you’ll need to cough up even more money to buy a better tool. Good job shill! :smiley: :smiley: There’s always a large crescent wrench, hammer of vice grips, so have a go at it!

For those who are happy with their HF purchases, Im glad you can still smile… at least for now! :bigsmile:

Who else has tales of HF tool woes (non viagra) to share? This seem to be the most appropriate place to share them! :smiley: :smiley:

Don't forget the FREE High-Power LED flashlight coupon !

Oh, I don’t know… I bought a Russian-made anvil from them when they first opened in my area, and it’s still “like new”! :wink:

(Seriously, thanks for this thread. I’m a HF fan…)

I used one of their cheap side-grinders on SWMBO’s car restoration project, and it’s still working.

OTOH, I’ve had some DOA power tools from them as well.

I get the best service if I just wait until I need the tool, go to HF and buy it, then take it out & use it hard as soon as I get home with it. If it finishes the first job it’s usually worth what I paid for it. If not it goes back in the box just as it came & they replace it with no fuss or bother (other than the ~15mi drive).

One of the first things I bought from them was a Mag-Charger-Clone-like flashlight. It sat on its charger for ~24hrs & still wouldn’t light up. When I took it back, they didn’t want the old one, stating they’d just toss it in the dumpster out back anyway, and would you be happy just taking a replacement? Yeah-buddy! Turns out, my bad! The 2nd one also didn’t light up, so I dissected them to find plastic discs “protecting” the contacts!! Yeah, I still feel bad about that brain fart. To be too honest, after I got them working, they weren’t worth the electricity it took to charge them, so they’re long gone now…

That’s what I like about FlashPilot. He is passionate and knowledgeable.
But I’ll say it again, for somethings, I LIKE Harbor Frieght.

Another story like FP. A friend of mine is an automotive insurance adjuster. He had a claim where an insured dashboard burned up. Very costly loss. It seems there was a Harbor Frieght fuse that didn’t blow when it should have.

Yeah, but hear this!

The latest SK’68’s I got from BangGood with the Lattice Bright emitters are barely brighter!……And they are purple LOL

To try and put this Harbor Freight thing in perspective.
My Dad used to say “Nothing succeeds like success” With 600 stores in the USA, could it be that there is some good.

And FP, I know you probably have SnapON roll away tool chests, but the U.S. General chests that HF carries (they recently bought U.S. General) are quite a bit better than the roll aways at HD, Lowes and Sears.
I have 11 roll away chests, 3 Homak (hence my name) a couple of Craftsman, Husky, Channel Lock, etc. But none of them are as good as the ones in HF. Actually, my 50 year old Craftsman may be its equal.

I wonder if FlashPilot is sure about that… it seems like he’s still on the fence about HF! :bigsmile:

A couple of other thoughts:
The cheap furniture dollys are a good source for four cheap casters. You can get those inexpensively with coupons or on sale, and they cost less than just a single caster alone.

The swappable bit screwdriver linked above isn’t great, but it uses standard bits. When I lost a bit from my favorite screwdriver, I bought the HF driver for .99, kept the bits, and tossed the screwdriver. They are the same size and appear to be the same quality as the original. Maybe not the best, but they are more than sufficient for working on PCs.

Hmm, some good/bad/ugly from my perspective. Only buy these on sale.

good: nitrile gloves. I go through a bunch when painting.
decent: moving blankets. Pretty disposable, but for 6 bucks or so, what do you want?
ugly: “automatic” center punch. The only thing automatic is that it fails to work. On the plus side, it pushed me to a Starrett 18C. (Though I probably could have gotten by with the hit power of the 18A.)
ugly: 25” long drill bits. Totally disposable, though if you need them for one or two holes, they’re cheaper than a real drill bit.
maybe: http://www.harborfreight.com/10-in-25-hp-tilebrick-saw-69275.html — I’ve seen a couple of these in the wild, and they’ve lasted way the heck longer than their pro tile guy owners ever expected
decent: 12g extension cords. Though you probably shouldn’t leave them out in the sun for too long.
good: zip ties.

Anyone able to comment on the 1/2” drive composite ratchet? $11 at the moment. http://www.harborfreight.com/1-2-half-inch-heavy-duty-composite-ratchet-66314.html

I don’t see why some people say do not buy anything with a cord from HF; I’ve read reviews and seen videos of some of their power tools and many of them are decent. Their miter saw, for example, is decent but has minor problems, but for less than $100, who cares? Also the $12 drill is fine has a high speed but low torque so it is fine for drilling but not good for driving. There’s also the oscillating multitool that appears to have decent reviews and is really cheap.
And if a tool breaks, just return it and get a new tool!

I wonder how their screwdrivers are. If they’re like the rubber screwdrivers at dollar tree, then they’re complete rubbish. But if they’re like the screwdrivers sold at Home Depot under the brand of HDX then they are good.

Those 2-pack of rubber handle screwdrivers sold at dollar tree are absolute rubbish! The material is poor quality. The flathead is ok because it’s simple, but the phillips sucks! If you try to turn a screw with high torque, the bloody screwdriver twists! Freaking ridiculous! Also the handles are disgusting slimy rubber and they probably have tons of “Chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm.” Recently I checked and noticed that there is a new version of those screwdrivers; the tips are dipped in black stuff (for some reason lots of screwdrivers are like that nowadays, what is the black stuff and what is it for?) and the handles are NOW EVEN SLIMIER!
Thought just now I checked their website (dollartree.com) and it’s not there anymore. Haven’t been in DT for a little while so maybe they discontinued it?

Speaking of Dollar Tree… they have a six piece small screw driver set (3 flat and 3 Phillips head) that ain’t half bad. I have a Sears Craftsman set with half a dozen broken screwdrivers… the damn Dollar Tree ones keep on ticking… for a dollar.

And for HF the infamous scissors (with the red dot) and their 100 piece razor blade pack. I have around 20 pairs of the scissors.

And their digital calipers (the metal ones) are great when on sale.

I disagree, the calipers used to be a great deal for $9.99 for the 6” version with the black decal on the beam. The grey ones they sell now are a joke compared to the old black decal ones. Are they better than nothing, sure, but they’re not what they used to be.

I’m serious when I say I’ve probably bought 20 of the old style, used them for all sorts of things like hacking them apart to make digital scales for my quill and tailstock on my manual mill and lathe. I bought 3 grey ones before I realized I wasn’t just getting duds, that’s just all the better they are now, gritty, poorly finished, and no longer turn on automatically when you move the slide.

We were on vacation a few years back, hundreds of miles from home and one morning I stepped on my glasses and broke them. Without them I can’t see, wouldn’t have been able to share the driving duties. So we found a Dollar Tree and I bought a pair of reading glasses and that small screw driver set. I was able to take apart the reading glasses and use the parts to fix my prescription pair!
One more reason my wife thinks I’m a genius. :slight_smile:

I haven’t bought any lately… I have around 10 sets of the black ones… they were $6.99 at the time. Had to go back several times over a week. They had a limit of two units at that price. Also got a couple of their 12” ones.

Yeah, treat your black beamed versions nice, the new ones they sell are really bad if you’re used to the ones you have now.

Yeah I’ve seen those and they look good and have good reviews. Only problem is that they are mal-formed… the handles are too small and the longer ones have smaller bits compared to the shorter ones… very odd but at least it works. That set is rather new and it wasn’t available when we got the garbage ones.

The ones I am talking about don’t have a single handle and replaceable bits. They are just a set of six small screwdrivers like you would use on laptops, etc.

The orange handled needle nose pliers are great for turning pills and retaining rings. Mind, that they're apparently made by a dozen workers of various skill levels and off widely differing specs, but if they put out a fresh batch and you're willing to spend 15-20 minutes picking you can usually find 2-4 very nice ones, sometimes for $.99!

I was thinking about this ; were you thinking about that ?

That… they ain’t no Xcelite or Wiha but for 16 cents each they are pretty darn good. I haven’t stripped, twisted, bent, folded, or mutilated one yet.

So we’re talking Dollar Tree now huh?
This thread was about Harbor Freight, but what I really think it is about is how it is possible to get really useful stuff for very little money sometimes. My favorite Dollar Tree item is this Scientific Calculator. I have seen many $1 calculators and although they all are “spot on” in their calculations, they usually fall short on usability. Keys that stick, or a poor readout etc. This one at Dollar Tree is excellent in all respects, an amazing value at $1, actually worth $10


Some of the stores still have a few and they used to be on their website. I just checked and they are no longer available for order. The only handheld I have that beats it is this.