Harbor Freight sale on some transport stuff.

[GSXR RACER MIKE]

Originally Posted by serpentracer

the trailers at least have to meet DOT standards anyway. they aren't the problem. it's all the other stuff HF sells.

Very true about the trailers.

It had been mentioned about the welds being bad on some of the China made stuff, I have personal experience with that. The local Pep Boys auto store had a bunch of those scooters / ATV's / go-karts / and dune buggies for sale that were all made in China. I was talking with the manager about them and he said they were seeing about 2 out of every 3 come back in a really short time after purchase, most with some type of substaintial problem(s). He said the most common problem was broken welds, the most common places were in the steering, suspension, and main frame. He showed me some that were broken and what the manufacturer was doing to make the welds look good, some had really thick layers of paint over the welds to make them look thicker and fill in all the holes, others actually had body filler over the welds to make it look like the weld was how it was supposed to be. When I looked at the welds it looked like they had a combination of problems, it looked like they had alot of contamination in the weld (most likely from not cleaning the weld area prior to welding) and they had very poor penetration of the weld into the metal - if at all (welder was set wrong, untrained person doing the welding, and/or even too weak of a welder). What was also obvious was that nothing had been done to the frame after welding, they just sprayed paint over any weld spatter or residues and even had rust going in the welds (under the paint) where the welds had broken.

I realize this wasn't Harbor Freight, but it was similar cheap import stuff. The main reason I shared this story was to show that not only was there very poor manufacturing going on, but they were also trying to hide it to get the quick sale instead of fixing what was causing the problem in the 1st place and making a decent product.

And don't get me wrong, there's bound to be some HF stuff that's ok, it's just a matter of luck if you end up with the ok stuff or not.