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. 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! Give that monkey a rotten banana and a good hard kick in the pants!
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! 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! 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: Give yourself a rotten banana and kick in the pants!!! 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! 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!!!
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! 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!