[gyrogeerloose]

[quote=Mark_G;1544978]Question, if I bought a vacuum from HF that didn't suck, which thread would I post it on?

At work, we bought two cheap HF 5-gallon wet vacs to help with an emergency clean-up of several hundred gallons of spilled hydraulic fluid mixed with water. Not only did they not suck (in the metaphoric sense), they worked great. Even after abusing them horribly for nearly a week, they were still ticking. Still are, a year later. I might get one for myself.

I'm a maintenance guy at a company that extracts salt from seawater via solar evaporation. As you might suspect, all things made of ferrous metals rust away very quickly in that environment so it's pretty pointless for us to buy top-quality tools when we know that they'll become useless due to rust long before they will ever have a chance to wear out. So, naturally, we buy a lot of stuff from Harbor Freight. Some of their stuff it surprisingly good--the wet vacs I mentioned above, for one. I can also vouch their better-quality Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Pro?) combination wrenches; nicely finished and they fit fasteners at least as well as a Craftsman wrench does.

On the other hand, there's the steel-handled claw hammer that failed in a rather interesting way as I was pulling some 16d duplex nails recently. It didn't just break suddenly, it felt as if the "steel" handle turned into something the consistency of a nice block of cheddar cheese first. On examination, the broken end showed signs of metal fatigue, which surprised me since the thing was almost new.