Harbor Freight Tools that don't suck

[Harry c]

Originally Posted by patrick_g

I have a 3+ year old HF floor mount metal bender that looks to be a neat way to do some decorative iron work, if I figure out how to use it. The manual is essentially worthless. OK so I haven't spent over a couple hours messing with it due to frustration with the manual. One day when I get time I will figure it out from brute force and awkwardness without the manual.

Pat

I have one of the benders as well. You're right about the worthless manual. I needed to make some specific repetitive bends and managed to figure out a way to do them. Probably not the way it was intended but bent them anyway. I don't think I'll ever have enough time to figure out how that thing is supposed to work.

[patrick_g]

Originally Posted by Harry c

I have one of the benders as well. You're right about the worthless manual. I needed to make some specific repetitive bends and managed to figure out a way to do them. Probably not the way it was intended but bent them anyway. I don't think I'll ever have enough time to figure out how that thing is supposed to work.

Thanks for sharing, Harry. Misery loves company. Maybe one day we will find someone who knows how to use it and we can share the knowledge. I was hopeful I was going to receive a bit of help on the instructions in the main but it didn't come.

Pat

[flusher]

I bought one of those HF $80 pressurized grit blasters (40 lb capacity). Tried it with HF's walnut shell grit and glass beads. Not very reliable. Lotsa time spent removing clogs. My $15 unpressurized grit blast gun from TSC is much more usable and reliable.

[Ken Cunningham]

I also bought a set of the digital calipers and wondered how acurate they are. We had some 3 mill poly bags laying around and I measured the thickness with them. They read .003 every time and we had some 2 mill bags and it read .002. So they are plenty accurate for most things.