Re: floor jack

I have bought a number of items from Harbor Freight. But I keep away from their tools if I want to get a long service live out of them. A lot of them are ok for home DIY, but for real work I wouldn't have them.

An example of what I do buy from them is disposable plastic gloves. There's not much to go wrong with them.

Bill

Things I buy or bought at Harbor Freight: - batteries - as good as any other brand, at a much lower cost - woodworking clamps - as good as any other brand, 1/4 the cost - Icon brand hand tools - professional quality - blades for jigsaw, reciprocating saw, oscillating multi tool - replacement no-flat wheels for lawn carts - scissor jack - lawn/garden tools - rake, shovel, hoe, post hole digger - 100ft fish tape - rolling tool cabinet - standard drill bits - brad point drill bits - consumables - sand paper, paper towels, shop rags, etc

Too many more to list. Once a month, they throw in a free 5-gallon bucket with any purchase, so now I have about 20 buckets. I'm planning to use them as planters, where they'll be hidden inside a decorative wooden enclosure.

Things I don't buy, or regret buying: - forstner drill bits - never were sharp to begin with - woodworking chisel set - never sharp, steel too soft to hold an edge

Regarding the rolling tool cabinet, my brother-in-law wanted one and asked me to go with him to Home Depot to pick it up. I suggested we swing by HF to look at theirs. He ended up buying the HD model, paying $550 instead of $250 at HF(on sale). I bought the HF model. Even he will admit that the two items are 99.98% identical, probably made in the same factory. The biggest difference is the name plate, which is located in exactly the same spot on both items.

As some of you may know, HF was started by a father/son duo, with the father being hardcore about low cost, which came with low quality. Thus, the HF reputation for low quality junk. When the father died, the son took the company in an entirely new direction. Quality was brought up, lifetime warranties added to specific product lines, etc. You can still buy junk at HF, but now you can also buy good quality, if that's what you need. Sometimes you want something for a single use.

Unless you have paws like mine. Nothing like having the glove split while you're spreading tar on the roof seams.

You're lucky. I bought a set of number drills and they're lucky if the can chew their way through soft pine.

When I was younger I bought only Craftsman hand tools, but I'm just a home mechanic, so now I buy from HF when I need a specific hand tool (usually it's a wrench in a larger size than I have as I have the Craftsman sets).

What I love (and hate) about Harbor Freight is that their tire-changing tools are affordable (and yet, crappy); but the fact is that they work.

Mounting & balancing SUV tires is (relatively) easy to do at home with them, but you need a bare minimum of the following three tools for SUVs.

1. Bead breaker
2. Tire mounter
3. Wheel balancer

These work. But they stink. You have to slightly modify each of them.

1. formatting link
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   My bead breaker is actually this one, which I had to slightly modify.
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   The problem is that the base is too short for SUV tires; so you have to extend the base (which I do simply by putting a board on top of it).
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   And don't even think about using the bead breaker "attachment" that comes with the tire-mounting tool. It's like an Apple gimmick. It doesn't work.

You need a dedicated bead breaker. Even with that dedicated bead breaker, it's still sometimes difficult to break the bead on an SUV tire.

1. But you will NEVER fail to break the bead with that bead breaker.
2. And you will NEVER fail to unmount/mount a tire with the tire mounter.
3. And you will almost never fail to perfectly balance using the balancer.

You have to run a free dynamic balance test by driving to Costco on the highway. If you feel vibration, keep going as Costco will balance ANY wheel (even if you didn't buy the tires from Costco originally).

If halfway to Costco, you don't feel any vibration, then your dynamic balance (road force balancing) test passed and then you can turn around.

I've never made it all the way to Costco yet! :)

BTW, you have to ENJOY mounting/balancing tires at home to do all this.

You don't mount & balance at home for cost reasons alone, but if you look at the costs, you can always make the argument that the tools end up free.

1. Bead breaker
2. Tire mounter
3. Wheel balancer 0

Rough that out as NRE costs of about $300 where you easily save about $20 per mount, where in my location (admittedly brutal on tires) each vehicle goes through a set of tires in about 3 years. We have three vehicles.

That's 12 tires every three years (or about $250 saved every three years).

But nobody DIYs for cost reasons alone as almost all people find changing tires either too dangerous or too much thinking for them - which is fine.

But I like the thinking part where you might be amazed at how much you have to know in order to mount tires & balance wheels correctly at home.

What I need to do now is find better alignment tools than what I'm using. Does Harbor Freight sell any suspension camber and toe checking tools?

I appreciate the information, may some day need it. I found an easier way, having owned 25 cars in the last 63 years. Works every time.

You go to the tire store or service station. You tell the guy what you want and relax with a cup or coffee or read the paper while they do it. If my method fails, I'll try yours.

I will never buy batteries from HF again. Half of the AA batteries in the package were bad.

I get the humor, because I do the same thing with cleaning of the bathroom. I hire housecleaners (actually my wife does the hiring) to do it for me.

But that's not all. Nope. I do a lot of hiring (and firing) it turns out. I hire a doctor too. And a lawyer.

Hell, I pay the butcher, the baker, maybe even the candlestick-maker. Naah.... I'll make my own candles if that's what I enjoy doing DIY myself. Which is the point after all.

For every ten or twenty thousand people, one does the job DIY himself. The rest hire it out.

That's why this newsgroup has very few people on it who actually do DIY.

Just as when you don't enjoy painting the walls or mowing the lawn or changing the oil or cleaning the pool or any number of home maintenance items, if you don't enjoy mounting tires & balancing wheels, you waste an inordinate amount of time, as you say you do, sitting around doing nothing.

But that's not what this group is all about, doing absolutely nothing but drinking coffee and reading the paper, is it?

BTW, you don't really get up and "go to a tire store" anymore, do you? You buy the best tires on the market for the best price on the market. The tires come to you. While you're sipping coffee & reading the paper. At home. In your jammies.

They ship the tire to you (or to the tire store, if that's what you want). And the negotiated price is already the lowest possible for that mounting.

Who wastes all that time and energy having to "go" to the tire store?

I'll betcha I haven't bought a battery outside of Costco in decades. Well, maybe the button type.

But for car batteries & standard-sized AA, AAA, C, D batteries? Costco!

I used to do plenty of DIY. Car and house. Painting was easy, plumbing and electrical were fun to do too. Installing a dishwasher was just a simple Saturday morning task. Plumbing and electrical included.

Then I got older. I found that writing checks was easier than nailing shingles. About six years ago, my wife had health issues so I got a cleaning service, every two weeks. They will be here Tuesday.

I've been in this house 6 years. In that time I can list the simple things I no longer do as the cleaning people take care of it.

I think it's certainly possible to get bad batteries from anywhere but I've never gotten a bad one from HF over the years. At least they don't leak. Sorry, Duracell, I didn't mean to drag you in here.

I don't know about their "alkaline" cells, as almost everything I use is NiMH or Li-ion, so I haven't looked at them, but in regards to NiMH....

Check the listed capacity (mah) on the packages. Basically the "C" and "D" cells are... "AA"s with lots of cardboard.

And that's what they print. Who knows what the reality is...

You need to stop lying to yourself, where I don't blame you for fooling yourself since I've heard the same lie from EVERYONE who doesn't do anything.

They make excuse. After excuse. After excuse. After excuse. Just like I do when the wife asks me to clean up the garage.

It's OK that you don't want to mount/balance tires/wheels at home. It's likely you have GREAT excuses for why you don't do it. a. You don't have the tools (nor the room to store them) b. You don't have the knowledge that it takes to DIY c. You are afraid of the risks (maybe the tire will explode?) etc.

It's OK. I've heard every excuse in the book from my own children (and their children) why they didn't do something that they could have done.

But just because you can't do it, please don't deprecate those that can. Be happy for them instead.

Ed is incapable of that . Just because he can't do it , you shouldn't too . He is , after all , a liberal .

Wednesday afternoon I disassembled the hydraulic ram on my log splitter - it was leaking at the piston rod seal and making a mess . This morning I dropped it off at a bearing supply/hydraulics repair shop* . My lovely wife and I hit a couple of thrift stores then enjoyed a leisurely lunch at the Chinese buffet . After lunch we stopped by the shop to pick up my assembly with new seals (27 bucks!) and headed home . The splitter is back on line and ready for the next load of rounds . And it doesn't leak any more !

You, on the other hand, are just a nasty prick that takes pleasure in demeaning others.

That's all I use, in AA and AAA size.

Marion snipped-for-privacy@facts.com wrote in news:vr2khm$23m7$ snipped-for-privacy@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com:

I think there's more DIYers who used to be on this ng, but there are fewer now for two reasons:

Look at the last many months of this ng statistics, and you'll see that most of the posts are now political; why do these children have to ruin what was once a useful ng?

Mike snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com wrote in news:vr312b$2r1mg$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

That, and the fact that a lot of us are getting to old to do DIY. I'll certainly never build another garage. But I might paint the living room. Certainly not an interesting enough project to talk about here, nor one on which I need any advice.

Usenet demographics. Vanishingly few new users come along; the rest of us continue aging.

Not absolutely nothing, no. This year has been an easy one for snow removal, but lawn-mowing season will be starting up in just a few weeks. I'll be out there weeding, pruning, and mowing. We have a few other projects lined up as well.

Yes, I get up and go to the tire store.

It's not a waste. I sit there and read, which is which I'd probably do at home. And I don't have to figure out which tires will work for my car. The sales guy presents me with a few options, and I pick one.