Testing Out Harbor Freight Tools

On this vlog we are doing something slightly different. There is still some of the normal coatings footage but we mainly focus on a new tool we bought from Harbor Freight. As most of you probably know Harbor Freight tools are kind of a hit or miss thing. Some of them are great and I have had them in the shop and used them for years. Other break when you take them out of the package, its always a crap shoot.

In this episode I went down to Harbor Freight and purchased a parts tumbler. For those of you who don't know what that is, its basically a bowl mounted to a vibrating pad that tumbles small parts and bolts in it in some sort of stripping media. The purpose of the machine is to strip minor rust and paint from small parts and then you can also polish them with different media.

For my purposes i would be using it to strip small parts and bolts that are too much of a pain to sandblast. So after returning to the shop and unboxing it, I loaded it up with a hand full of bolts and turned it on. Now to be fair the manual said that to strip bolts it should take 4-6 hours. I pulled the bolts after 6 hours and they were somewhat cleaned off but not great. I placed them back in and ran it for another 4 hours and by then they were better but still not exactly what I was expecting. Now one thing I still have to try is a higher grade tumbling media. I purchased the Harbor Frieght stuff and as we all know its very hit or miss and would call this stuff a miss. I will be purchasing new media in the future but for the time being all I have tested is the Harbor Freight stuff.

Stay tuned for an update next time we use this........

Travis Ridenour

Owner

TLR Coatings

Kalamazoo, MI

TLRCoatings.com