[alfa] Re: Parts cleaning and Storage

[George Graves <gmgraves@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard. Aren't you throwing the baby out with the bath water here? 
Sure, Harbor Freight sells a lot of junk, much of it from mainland 
China and the "better" stuff from Taiwan. But I've a mechanic's tool 
set that I put together out of tools bought from HF that I simply 
wouldn't have without them. Their wrench sets are fine, and if you 
break one, who cares? They're so cheap, you just buy another. I've 
bought big socket sets from them for practically nothing that, if 
bought from Snap-On or Craftsman would have cost hundreds of dollars. 
As far as quality is concerned, all I can say is that it got my 
steering wheel nut off and the socket didn't break. I've purchased 
breaker bars, socket extensions, a set of ratcheting box wrenches, a 
plier set, air compressor hoses, a nifty heavy-duty tire gauge, and 
countless other trinkets from them. Would I have bought this stuff if I 
were working on cars professionally? NO. But for light, occasional 
duty, I see nothing wrong with any of it. Just recently, I took the air 
damn off of my GTV-6 (Alfa content) to repaint it. Before putting it 
back, I used a Harbor Freight pop-rivet type captive nut inserter to 
insert captive nuts on the inside lip of the front fender where the 
air-damn wraps around the wheel well. Now, instead of having to fish a 
nut behind behind there, the screw holding the damn in-place just 
threads into the captive nuts. I paid $20 for the blind-nut pop-rivet 
gun and a supply of different sized pop-nuts. A "good" one would have 
set me back more than $100. My point is that if you shop carefully, 
with an eye to how often you are going to use a tool, Harbor Freight 
just MIGHT be the ticket in a lot of places.


George Graves
'86 GTV-6 3.0 'S'

On Oct 27, 2003, at 12:43 AM, alfa-digest wrote:


> Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 17:54:03 -0500 (EST)
> From: Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>
> Subject: Re: [alfa] re: Parts cleaning and Storage
<snip>

> richard
>    (who doesn't buy from harbor freight anymore)
> - --
> Richard Welty                                         
> rwelty@domain.elided
> Averill Park Networking                                         
> 518-573-7592
>     Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, 
> Security
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