I've been a slow learner on buying some of their junk, but one that I feel is worth commenting on is their spring compressor for taking coil springs off your vehicle. I priced a pair from Snap On first, which was my problem. Since I don't plan on taking off coil springs for a living, I figured that Snap On was nuts and bought a set from Horrible Freight. I mean, c'mon on, how complicated can they be? It's a darn piece of all thread with a couple of sliding hooks on them with a nut on the outside of each hook.
I was changing a busted CV joint on my pickup and the book said to remove the coil spring. I slipped one of the compressors on opposites of the coil spring and started cranking on the nuts. With the pickup jacked up it wasn't going to take all that much to compress the spring enough to clear it's cradle. So, before long I had the spring compressed just enough to tilt it out of it's cradle and remove it from the truck. Great I figured, that was easy enough and I'd saved myself a couple hundred bucks on the tool.
About the time I got the compressed spring out, and basically had it in my lap while sitting on the barn floor, the spring compressors broke! Fortunately for me, the spring missed my important parts by about an inch and just grazed the inside of my right thigh on the way to putting a nice chip in the concrete floor.
Possibly even luckier, the spring missed the underside of my chin when it shot upwards towards it's trip to putting a hole in my ceiling. However, it was close enough that it did hit the bill of my ball cap and popped the cap right off my head! On the way down the spring hit the top of my bed rail denting it and then bounced off to one side and killed my DeWalt radio I had on the shelf.
Talk about getting really lucky!! An inch either way and, literally, I could have been killed.
I have since discovered that HF's spring compressors just use standard all thread and not the more expensive (and required) hardened all thread. What junk! Besides being junk, how dangerous!! Needless to say, I wasn't much in the mood for a HF replacement. I ended up renting a quality spring compressor and did the job no problem.
Oh yeah, I had 3 of the HF 14" cut-off wheels that are made in Russia explode on me. Like the spring compressor, I don't care if they're free, they aren't worth using. It's these things that are flat dangerous that concern me more than the simple junk wrenches that break on the first use or many of their other hand tools that self destruct on the first use.
