On Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 10:35:37 AM UTC-5, Leon wrote:

If you are serious about woodworking and plan to use the clamps often it
is very likely that you will seldom use these clamps once you replace
them with better ones.

Many years ago I had a really big glue up and bought a bunch of HF clamps. I had bought the big all wood clamps (a Jorgenson C clamp knock off) and plain ductile iron clamps before and they worked great.

So I figured I would be OK if I bought their bar clamps and some squeeze clamps. They worked for the first glue up, then one or two failed after the second glue up, and then finally after about a year of use all but two of ten had failed. It was worse with their hand squeeze clamps, which I use three or four times a week sometimes all day as a second set of hands. Eventually, after light use all of them (about 6) failed completely.

To put this in perspective, I have four bar clamps that were made in the 1920s or 1930s and have been heavily used. They still work fine, although with the bars a little bent (and being really heavy) they are more backup clamps than anything else. I have some off brand of squeeze clamp I bought at HD about 20 years ago that I have used for all twenty years, and they still work fine. Ditto my 3' and 4' Stanley and Irwin clamps which are probably in the 15 year range. I have Pony pipe clamps that have to be 50 years old that were given to me by a retired contractor that used them for everything you could imagine, and they work just fine.

With their short, **** poor track record, HF turned I will never buy another HF clamp unless I figure some way it might be a one time use. Clamps are tools I expect to work, period.

Robert