I Love You Harbor Freight, But You Smell Like Plastic Hell

[rrxx-1]

As I'm typing this, somewhere nearby is a transmission jack that I own. There's also a mini tire changer and a portable wheel balancer and a five-ton gear puller. Five tons! That's a frigload of tons!

Someday I may use these tools for the purposes intended, but if I don't, so what? I bought them at Harbor Freight, which means no one would care if I used them at all. Least of all, perhaps, me. And it's probably safer that way.

Harbor Freight is a national chain of discount tool stores that's become an obsession among the tool-crazed of every mechanical ilk. It's both Greek Agora and Santa Claus of hardware, a giant, bottomless toybox to satisfy any impulsive DIY fantasy for alarmingly few dollars. Did I mention I have a 24" Pittsburgh-brand crescent wrench with a head the size of Ron Perlman's fist? Goddamn straight I do. I think it was 20 bucks. Anyone have a drawbridge that needs dismantling, I'm your guy.

Our brains are hard-wired to love tools. We love them for what we can do with them, and for what we wish we were doing with them right now. Sure we can slap on a set of brake pads, but sometimes we just want to sit Indian-style among a crapload of cheap tools dreaming of Keith Duckworth coaxing 10 extra horses out of a Double Four Valve. Harbor Freight is where this kind of wishful thinking meets actual utility.

Harbor Freight's tools are so cheap, they've changed the whole dynamic of tool ownership. In the old days, if you needed a tool you didn't have, you'd call a friend and say something like, "Hey man, can I borrow your impact wrench?" And he'd say, "poophead, you still have my impact wrench from the last time you borrowed it." Now, you'd just go to Harbor Freight and buy six or seven impact wrenches, then go home and build an impact-wrench-powered go-kart.

Indeed, Harbor Freight's killer app is access to the kind and quantity of tools a part-time mechanic might never have considered buying. Pre-Harbor Freight, you'd say things like, "Buy an engine hoist? Do I look like Mister folking Goodwrench?" Now you'll pick up a couple, plus a rolling engine stand — for the price of screwdriver set from Snap On — so you could pull the F22B out of your wife's old Honda Accord and smash it through the wall of the sun porch while drunk.

Here's a perfect example: Harbor Freight sells a portable scissor lift that can hoist a 6,000-pound car — all four wheels off the ground. It costs $1,200, which is a lot for a tool, but not a lot for a lift. Think of the convenience: You set up the lift in the morning, drop your car's subframe by noon, and be released from the hospital six weeks later, minus a foot.

You see, Harbor Freight's tools, while cheap and often flimsy, are reasonably useful. They're robust enough for at least one serious use before breaking. Sometimes, Harbor Freight tools don't work at all, and that provides a tantalizing bit of dramatic tension. Will this $5 brake bleeder douse me in fluid? Who cares? It's five bucks, and I just bought 38 of them. Know what you're getting for your birthday this year? Maybe a bath in brake fluid, maybe a workable one-man brake bleeder. Cross your fingers. Or at least, count them.

Although Harbor Freight's mission is purportedly to stretch your tool-buying dollar, the best thing about it is the sheer acquisitive joy. Imagine you're a kid on a museum field trip with a $50 bill your dad that morning stuffed into your hand on the way out the door. (Shhh. He thought it was a five). After a gift-shop orgy, you run home with a bag of cheap, amazing crap. Now, if you compared the cost of those keychains, polished rocks and rubber-band-powered grist mills to the value of love bursting from your heart, it would have microwaved Milton Friedman's skull. Harbor Freight's value proposition is exactly the same, only for grown-ups with credit cards.

The reason they're so cheap is that Harbor Freight tools are made — mostly in China — of a kind of bargain plastic that sublimates directly from solid to a gas, like dry ice, losing their mass year after year in a pungent waft of formaldehyde and pickled sea cucumber. I'll bet if you put a Harbor Freight 12V grease gun in a time capsule, 50 years later you'd find just a pile of lithium and an on-off switch.

One day we may find out the Chinese have been intentionally fouling the sperm of American males with something sinister in those outgases, making our offsprings' heads get all misshapen like that Forever Alone guy from the Internet. It wouldn't matter. That smell of plastics laden with phthalic acid — which chemists use as "plasticizers," softening agents added to make plastic tools more flexible and durable — is like bath salts to Harbor Freight toolheads. To them, that pungent, plasticky scent is like freshly cut grass or the yeasty aroma from a pub doorway on a Saturday evening. When it comes to aromatic hydrocarbons, teenaged glue sniffers in the '70s had nothing on Harbor Freight denizens.

As the quality of consumer products go, Harbor Freight tools fit somewhere between the junk you buy absent-mindedly while waiting at the car wash and Sears's Craftsman line. But if you're only going to use your drill press in anger, say, twice a year, the cost-benefit works out. And many, many people do get good use out of the stuff they buy at Harbor Freight, even when they actually use it. Maybe they couldn't run a commercial shop on Harbor Freight merch, but that's what the higher-priced stuff is for.

When I bought the jack, the balancer, the wrench, and the other stuff I've accumulated from Harbor Freight I swear I had the best of intentions. Perhaps I was lured by the promise of a particularly sexy kind of extreme automotive utility, which sounds kinky enough to be an actual thing. Call it temporary chemical psychosis, brought on by delusions of grandeur and mild asphyxiation. Keith Duckworth would be appalled.

 

[Mooseman]

That is funny. But did you really write this?

We have a similar store here called Princess Auto. I've been to Harbor Freight but Princess Auto is BIGGER with MORE STUFF! And yes, they get their stuff from the same manufacturers as HF but with their own brand name on it called Power Fist. (Yeah, LOL!)

 

[yamahinn03]

rrxx-1 you are so right, and all this time I thought it was just me.. That store is great for the tools you need just every now an then... I still Love my Craftsman hand tools..

 

[rrxx-1]

That is funny. But did you really write this?

We have a similar store here called Princess Auto. I've been to Harbor Freight but Princess Auto is BIGGER with MORE STUFF! And yes, they get their stuff from the same manufacturers as HF but with their own brand name on it called Power Fist. (Yeah, LOL!)

No, I just copy and pasted it. But maybe if harbor freight had a long post writer tool I could......

 

[rrxx-1]

I can relate to this. I picked out several hundo's of cheap tools and sent the wife to get them. Much to my surprise when she showed up at my shop door with a full car load of cheap tools.

 

[snobill]

Funny but so true !

 

[Cubby]

Princes Auto is the Harbor Freight of Canada. And I confess I have a lot of Powerfist tools. But anything that takes heavy use is Dewalt or Porter Cable, etc.

I love the place.

 

[smalltownpower]

princess auto is amazing. you buy a 6.5 or 7 hp gas engine for 99 dollars.. yes folks, a Honda is 550, 89-99 dollars for a gas engine that starts effortlessly in 1 pulls no matter the weather. bypass the governor (properly, governor geear and shaft removed from engine) and boom you got a mini bike that goes 65-70kmh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuw3kzTLyAE we have 3 minibikes, and the abuse they go through we only broke 1, hit a stone so hard cracked the case, lost the oil and seized the rod. fixed the crack, put a pipe wrench on the crank to break it free, cracked the piston skirts when it broke free, ground them off below the oil rings, sand papered the crank and rod, put it back together and yes, it ran for over 2 months knocking like crazy, plus having half a piston. no replacements here, heck its a 100 dollar engine who cares how long the fix works, surprised me it went 2 months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuQIY9bt_pQ attached are a few videos of what these lil engines go through daily.. yes studded tires in the winter, sheet metal screws from the inside and double tubed. my brothers and cousins get bored, better then being infront of a tv haha. princess auto quality isn't all that great but we have all cought ourselves beating on a pry bar or screw driver, their not meant to be abused by a 3 pound mini sledge haha, but who cares, it was 5 dollars. I got a bunch of cool little gadgets, mini butane torches I use for soldering and heat shrink, simple 1 hand use, starts first click every time, yup, 7 dollars, wire strippers. and I mean, pull the trigger and perfectly stripped wires without cutting a single strand cheap, 7-8 bucks. has been working for 3 years, and its used few times a week in the shop! on the farm its fairly impractical to have a tool box in every tractor, who wants name brand stuff that will be dusty and rolling around in a tool box, like 20 bucks for a 32 inch half inch breaker bar, how cant you put one of those in every tractor, club hammers for 5 bucks, princess autos cheap tool sets are good enough to throw in the tractor for the season, and who cares if you miss the shovel or spike with the hammer and split the handle, it wasn't a 40 dollar hammer. a hammers a hammer. now theres a few things I wouldn't trust from them, such as cut off wheels or anything quite dangerous, watched my uncle have a master craft (Canadian tire) cut off wheel break into 3 pieces, through his carhartt parka and enough into his shoulder to bleed for a while, if that canvas parka wasn't there hed be surgically removing that in a hospital 3 hours away. its common sense, I wouldn't fill a shop tool box with the stuff, but you know, theres always a need for the "holy crap that's cheap" gizmos and gadgets. or the odd screw driver set that will be thrown in a tractor toolbox covered in layers of grain dust and exposed to the outside moisture, or the pry bar that needs a little persuasion from your 5 dollar hammer. haha oh boy I could talk about princess auto all day. its like a whole nother planet once you walk through those doors

 

[smalltownpower]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotatio ... j0fPEg4ukU this is the vid I meant to tag

 

[MCApex44]

nice vids smalltownpower!

 

[smalltownpower]

lol thanks, I have nothing to do with them tho haha, well I did race in the indy 500 for a few nights in the summer, but that was it. I spend like 95 percent of my time at the family farm, where from the house to the end of the bin yard is roughly .7km, and no walking isn't awesome all the time haha, so my mini bike stays there. we are all completely amazed how the one video made it over 40,000. like really, 4 kids from a town of 250 people made it haha. just a bit of info on the indy 500 tho, the "track" is roughtly .7km. and over the course of the summer they would do 200-250 laps a night, and they did that whenever they were bored. they easily did 2000 laps by now in the last 2 years. just think of how many km's these bikes have haha, not to mention them riding to the farm (16km's) or riding from the farm to a near by town for icecream (8km from farm to icecream). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_weoZn2R3po haha im sure a few people will get a laugh out of this video. chain broke just leaving town one day (dinner break so I went for icercream with them, rained day before, couldn't do any combining) we tired the chain on my bike, and hooked it to his bike with the bungee cord he used for his chain tensioner. it was hilarious, but we made it the long trip home without incident. I still laugh about that. check out my youtube channel, theres a few more videos about these Chinese Honda clone 99 dollar mini bikes haha.

 

[Mooseman]

And the funny thing about Princess Auto is that they will shamelessly copy a tool and sell it right next to the original at a third of the price.