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!