Rev up your engines,
today I'm going to talk about harbor freight tools, now I've been a mechanic for 51 years
so I got a garage full of tools, you're not going to spend that kind of money fixing your
own car, so you want to buy certain tools that you need, and you don't want to pay too
much, but on the other hand you don't want to buy cheap junk that's going to fall apart,
so you want to save money buying tools and a lot of people have asked me in the past,
scotty what do you think of harbor freight tools, well I've bought stuff from them for
the past few decades to tell you the truth, and I found out some rather interesting things,
now the first is the bad, you do not want to go too cheap when you're buying tools,
here's an example of a tool I got at harbor freight tools and it was too cheap, I bought
a cut off saw for cutting off mufflers and exhausts and body panels and stuff, and I
made a mistake and bought one of these $29 ones at harbor freight tools, and yeah I admit
it I've been cheap my whole life, well in that case I went too cheap, the thing only
lasted a few months and finally when I was sawing and it shorted out the wiring, kicked
my circuit breaker off on the house, yeah I admit it I made a mistake, the I got this
dewalt cut off saw, no problems at all and if you look closely you can see this is all
ground down here cuz I actually ran over it with a ford pickup truck and it dragged it
down the street, but it still works fine, this is a solid built saw, yeah it costs a
lot more than the cheap one did but in the case of this it's worth buying a good one
if you're planning on using it for years, and when I reach into my drill bag with drill
bits here's another thing not to buy cheaply, drills bits, you don't want a set of cheap
drill bits you can see this one has snapped right off cuz it's just cheaply made, they
say that it's titanium coated or whatever but that doesn't do anything, if the steel
inside is cheap it's going to snap off like this, so you see a set of drill bits and there's
like 20 of them for $10 believe me don't buy them, unless your drilling into wood or something
that doesn't have much resistance, if your working on cars forget it, but good drill
bits, in most cases if you want a good drill bit their going to cost $9 or more each, not
for a set of a bunch of them, and the same goes for the drills themselves, yeah I tried
some of those cheaper harbor freight ones and they all burnt out early, so now I got
a dewalt drill too and this thing has been going for years and years and I never had
any problems with it at all, so I can see your now thinking, oh scotty is just a hater
he doesn't like them, well they do have good products too, especially lately they've been
going more high end on a lot of their tools to get mechanic like myself to go there and
buy stuff, here's a perfect example, this zurich zr13 scan tool is about $200 and it
does a lot of stuff, it does all the scan tool data, trouble codes, and it will also
check your battery, check your alternator to make sure your charging system is good,
it's actually a really good tool, it's one if their new zurich lines where their trying
to make better tools for people that are serious about fixing cars, in the past they sold a
lot of cheap scan tools that they weren't all that great, but now their going for higher
quality scan tools, and since if you search on the internet for harbor freight discount
coupons, every time I buy something big from them, hey I can always find a 20% off of one
item somewhere on the internet, if it's a $200 tool, hey now it's only $180, now when
it comes to heavy duty tools I've used them in the past, underneath all this stuff that
I hang on is a 20 ton press, it's made out of very thick steel, when I press with it
I've never had any problems with anything, I've never found anything that I was working
on that I couldn't press on or off with this thing, and yeah when I compared priced before
I bought it, other places that were selling the same rated press, those things were 3
or 4 times more expensive than this thing was, let's face it steel is a pretty cheap
commodity when it comes down to it, the sell it buy the ton, they make these things in
China, yeah their made in China, I've had no problems at all with them, and when it
comes to jacks, here's a jack that I got from harbor freight tools this daytona, you see
all those jack handles behind me, those are all harbor freight jacks and they all still
work, some of them are 20-30 years old, again we're talking mainly steel and a simple hydraulic
ram jack that picks it up and down, pretty simple technology, hey the Chinese a good
at building that stuff, I've been using Chinese jacks for the last 40 years, and the only
reason I have a bunch of them is because they keep making cars lower to the ground, so I
keep having to get jacks that are lower and lower, so I can slide them under the car and
actually jack the car up in the air without either damaging the bodywork and not even
being able to get it under there, so my advice on that is get a low profile one like this
daytona, when their this low they'll get under just about anything, and since this one is
a heavy duty jack it also goes high enough that even though it goes low, I've used it
working on f150 pickup trucks and it's high enough to get the tires and everything off,
let's say you want to work on your car's ac system you got to have a vacuum pump, and
I bought this at harbor freight decades ago, and sure if you look at it you can see the
plastic cover is cracked I got a strap holding it on, but the thing still works, so it may
look beat up but it still works and it's worked for decades, and I paid like $60 for this
when it was on sale, and heavy duty sockets, hey these are made out of heavy duty steel,
I never had any problems with them, the only problem I had is my own, you can see these
are different and that's because I lost the other ones, and if your into welding, once
I bought one of their $99 welders, really it was a piece of junk it didn't work worth
beans, but a few years ago I bought one of their $300 welders and it's been an excellent
welder, because again you can't go too cheap, the $300 one man it's a good welder, it puts
out a lot of power solid thing, but the $99 one, I should have known, when the really
good ones were like $800-900 hey I'm happy with the $300 one it works perfectly fine,
but the $99 one, don't go too cheap, same thing goes with their generators, I bought
a $89 generator when it was on sale, I mean it's ok to run a coffee maker or something,
but then I bought a $500 one, and man that thing is great, I could run my air compressor,
all kinds of power tools off of that thing, hey it's a pretty good unit, and I know we're
all looking for the pie in the sky that we're going to buy a $5 lottery ticket and make
$500 million, but let's face the facts, you can get a good deal, but don't think you're
going to get a totally fantastic deal on a tool that hardly costs anything, cuz odds
are it's not going to be such a hot tool, so know you know what I think of harbor freight
tools, there's good things, and there's bad things, do your research before you buy them,
and you can make out quite well if you spend a reasonable amount of money buying tools
that aren't super expensive but their not the cheapest thing you can get your hands
on, and since this is mechanic Monday I'm giving away one of these harbor freight disc
brake kits, it's the same exact one that I've been using for years, to have a chance to
win place a clean non offensive comment on the YouTube comments below, and a winner will
be chosen randomly by computer to get this great brake kit so you can do your own brake
jobs, so if you never want to miss another on of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that bell!
