Slickdeals New User Guide (helpful for even some of us older users)
Harbor Freight Coupon Policy
Harbor Freight's official coupon policies and usage instructions can be read here:
How to use Coupons [harborfreight.com]
However, for your convenience, here is a summary of the kind of coupons HF offers and the important things to know when using them:
- One coupon per item, no double dipping on coupons. For example, you cannot combine an item-specific coupon advertising a socket set for $4.99 and stack that with a 20% coupon. You must choose one or the other.
- Prices on item-specific coupons are not always better than using a 20% off coupon. Be sure to check the pre-coupon price of the item online or on the shelf in-store to compute the after 20% discount price and compare it to your item coupon price.
- Fixed price item coupons will list a purchase QTY limit for that item at coupon price.
- You may have a fixed price item coupon retroactively applied to a previous purchase within 30 days. Just bring in your receipt and the coupon and they should refund you the difference.
- One percentage off coupon per purchase, per day. 20% off coupons are ubiquitous and can be found year round. Occasionally HF will release 25% off coupons, usually during holidays and other random times during the year with short periods of validity.
- You can use 20% off coupons on top of sale prices with the following exceptions not already mentioned:
Excludes the following items:- Inside Track Club Membership
- Extended Service Plans
- Gift Cards
- Open box items
- Items advertised in a "Parking Lot Sale" flyer
- Compressors
- Floor Jacks
- Safes
- Saw Mills
- Storage (Tool) Cabinets, Chests or Carts
- Trailers
- Trenchers/Backhoes
- Welders
Excludes the following brands:- Admiral
- Ames
- Bauer
- Cobra
- CoverPro
- Daytona
- Earthquake
- Fischer
- Hercules
- Icon
- Jupiter
- Lynxx
- Poulan
- Predator
- Tailgator
- Viking
- Vulcan
- Zurich
- FREE ITEMS:There are quite a few items that can be had for free with a coupon with any purchase or with a specified minimum purchase amount. Like the % off coupons, these are also limited to one per customer per day.
WHERE TO FIND COUPONS
The best online resource for finding copies of HF coupons will be through a site a fellow slickdealer has put together and maintains:Parking Lot Sales
http://www.hfqpdb.com/
This site will always have the best percentage-off coupon available as well as just about every free item coupon in existence. In addition, it will also have a plethora of item-specific fixed-price coupons. Fortunately, next to each item-coupon shows what the current pre-coupon price of the item is and what the price would be if a 20% coupon were applied to determine if it would be better to use a 20% coupon on the item.
There is also a nifty sub-page that will allow you to try and find available coupons by item number:
http://www.hfqpdb.com/tools
Aside from that, here are other ways you can obtain digital or physical harbor freight coupons:
On Harbor Freight's Webpage or sub-pages:HarborFreight.com [harborfreight.com]Weekly Sales Pages (updated regularly)
Monthly Sales Flyer [harborfreight.com]
Extra Savings [harborfreight.com]
Digital Savings [harborfreight.com]
Savings Coupons [harborfreight.com]
Harbor Freight's Email and Mailing List
Value When You Need It Most - April Coupons [harborfreight.com] Thru 4/30 - Moving Blankets, Batteries, Sawhorse, Cement Mixer, Miter Saw Stands, Sand Blast Cabinet, Compressors, Moving Dollies, Can-o-Pee, ...
You can get deal newsletters emailed to you as well as their monthly mailed catalog which includes normally around a half-dozen pages of coupons in addition to a listing of a majority of their entire in-store product selection and current sale prices:Harbor Freight's Social Media Pages
Emailed Deals Newsletter and Monthly Mail Catalog Signup [harborfreightsignup.com]
Harbor Freight Facebook page [facebook.com]
Harbor Freight on Twitter [twitter.com]
You can find an assortment of HF coupons in various online and local publications/newspapers, coupon packs you get in the mail, and certain magazines that typically target the men's handyman/mechanic/auto enthusiast/outdoorsman demographic.COUPONS/DEAL ALERTS VIA TEXT
Here are some online publications:Progressive Farmer [dtnpf-digital.com] This link should open up the most current issue. To find the Harbor Freight coupon pages, move your cursor towards the top left of the page to find the Menu drop-down. Expand the "Advertisers" selection to find "Harbor Freight" which will then display the pages with the coupons when clicked.Here are a list of some printed magazine publications you will frequently find a page or two of coupons towards the back of the magazine:
Clipper Clippert [nwclipper.com] Sweet site, locate the "harbor freight" line items in the list.
Issuu.com [issuu.com] This site contains a bunch of digital copies of popular magazine publications (albeit not very well organized and curated). You can browse under certain categories like "Vehicles" to find magazines that will regularly have HF coupons.
4 Wheel & Off Road, American Rifleman, Boating, Car & Driver, Cycle World, Diesel Power, Dirt Rider, Discover, ESPN, Field & Stream, Flying, Four Wheeler, Grass Roots Motorsports, (The Family) Handyman, Home Theater, Hot Bike, Hot Rod, Import Tuner, Jp Magazine, Kiplinger's (Personal Finance), Maxim, Men's Journal, Men's Fitness, Men's Health, Mini Truckin', Money, Mopar Muscle, Motor Boating, Motor Cyclist, Motor Trend, Off-Road, Outdoor Life, Playboy, Popular Mechanics, Popular Photography, Reader's Digest, Rolling Stone, Popular Science, Science Illustrated, Shotgun News, Shutterbug, Smithsonian, Successful Farming, Transworld Motocross, Truck Trend, Via(for AAA members), Wood, Woodworker's Journal, Westways(for AAA members).
Text the word TOOLS to 222377 for coupons and sale alerts. Up to 4 messages per month.INSIDE TRACK CLUB
Message and data rates may apply.
Text the word TEXTSTOP to cancel.
Harbor Freight's "Inside Track Club" (ITC) gives you exclusive access to other product coupons not normally available to the general public as well as 1 hour early access to Harbor Freight's parking lot sales. The product coupons offered will often feature more niche items or items generally never seen in the normal circulating assortment of product coupons found in the aforementioned public sources.
The value of this membership has received mixed reviews as many deals that are offered are no better or sometimes worse than simply using a 20% off coupon on the advertised item. However, since you are only allowed to use the 20% off coupon once per day, it may help to purchase a variety of needed items at a discount in one trip.
Recently, members have been posting the monthly issues of ITC coupons to this forum and they are usually uploaded to HFQPDB. HF's POS systems are not configured to confirm Inside Track Club membership nor does it prompt the cashier to check. The system treats ITC coupon codes like any other regular coupon. Cashiers reportedly don't bother to confirm your membership either and simply scan any coupon you give them with no questions asked. Normally if you verbally give the cashier the coupon code to enter, they will do so and the system will simply process it like normal.
Currently the membership fee is $29.99 for 1 year or $44.99 for two years. Either comes with a free $10 gift card for signing up.
To find out more information or to sign-up, please click here [harborfreight.com].
Harbor Freight runs a parking lot tent sale about once every 10 weeks which runs for 3 days over a weekend starting on Friday. They will typically start handing out the 4-page flyer for this event in stores 6-8 weeks in advance. The items advertised are mostly the same collection of items you regularly see advertised in their other flyers and publications issued throughout the year. The advertised prices for these items are usually the same as the prices you see on the item-specific coupons found year-round. The difference here being that you can purchase these items at their usual coupon price without actually needing a coupon. Remember, however, that you cannot stack any percentage-off coupons on any item advertised in their parking lot flyer.OTHER USEFUL HF INFORMATION
The biggest deal with the parking lot sale is that they sell, at a discount, all their open-box items (usually customer returns), cosmetically damaged items, or items that are missing non-essential parts or parts that can be replaced. On the first day (Friday), prices for these items are as-marked with special orange stickers. For most items, these starting prices are no better than or worse than the prices you can get for these items in new condition with coupon. On Saturday, they offer them at 25% off the marked price which, typically, is only marginally better than usual coupon prices. But on Sunday, they increase the markdown to 50% off the stickered price which is where you can really make out like a bandit, but be aware that a lot of the big-ticket items are well picked-over by this time. Sometimes the managers have increased the discount to over 50% near the end of the day and you can sometimes make an offer to the manager for remaining open-box items near closing hours on Sunday.
Be aware that marked-down purple-tagged items (also seen year round in a designated open-box section of the store) are generally priced as marked and are non-negotiable. They are generally like-new open box customer returns, or missing pieces which is normally the result of the store's method of cannibalizing new kits to warranty-replace whatever pieces broke in a customer's kit. The marked down price is usually 20% off which means it's better to buy a new one with a coupon. Honestly, they are just trying to pawn off these purple-tagged items to ignorant customers.
Lastly, be aware that all open-box items are sold as-is with only a 5 day return policy.
Product User ManualsYou can obtain an online copy of the manual for many items by taking the part number and inserting it into the following URL format along with a specified 1000-item number range. For example, if you needed the manual for item #41653 which is in the 1000-range of 41000-41999 format the URL like the following:Price adjustments
http://www.harborfreight.com/manuals/41000-41999/41653.PDF [harborfreight.com]
Coupons that have expired and are no longer valid may still be honored or partially honored by discretion of the HF customer service representative or in-store manager.HF CONTACT INFO
For online orders, call customer service with the item and coupon numbers and they may be willing to process the order for less on the phone or adjust your online order after it has been placed.
If you need to get a hold of customer service:
Call 1-800-444-3353, Monday thru Friday, 6:00 am to 4:30 pm PST time
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected] <----- This seems to be the most effective form for complaints
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12,525 Comments
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A click type torque wrench should NEVER be set below the lowest setting - they will lose calibration. They should be stored set to the lowest setting, which is not 0. For the HF wrenches, it's around 20 ft-lbs. In addition, before use, they should be manually activated several times to lubricate the mechanism.
I know these are probably not considered the "approved standard" but for reference the Snap On brand click types in this torque range @ $250 plus are +- 4%. Isn't that an 8% accuracy range swing? At 20% high, and I don't know if that was confirmed on every torque wrench HF puts out or just a certain lot or even a particular wrench, I think $9.99 is worth taking a chance on as a DIY'er. If all else fails, subtract 20% on your torque setting.
My advice is that most people will get better results with a beam type torque wrench from Sears.
Given the overlap in scales (12 in-lb=1 ft-lb), the HF 3/8" drive torque wrench is not really needed, since the HF 1/4" and 1/2" cover the range. As you note, there is no beam type Craftsman 1/4" drive wrench, and the resolution of the 3/8" drive beam wrench is 30 in-lbs.
However, there is a big accuracy issue with the HF 1/4" torque wrench. The first issue is that it operates differently than the other torque wrenches - there is only one "click" and it is very quiet and soft and easy to miss. They are hard to use, much harder than other click wrenches or a beam type.
Accuracy seems to be in the range of +/-50% out of the box, for the ones I tested. Unfortunately, I discovered this issue when I overtorqued valve cover bolts. I set the wrench to the correct 80 in-lb setting, but had oil leaks. Upon investigation, the 130 in-lb of torque the wrench applied at the 80 in-lb setting was enough to dimple the valve cover around the bolts. When I went back to the store and tested several, they were all over the place, but none within 20% of the set torque. In my experience and opinion, I can't trust the 1/4" HF and it is essentially useless.
To achieve accurate low in-lb torque settings, for bearing preloads, valve cover bolts, etc. a better choice is a screwdriver style beam wrench or a smaller beam wrench with a 0-50 in-lb range. It's a machinists tool and you can usually find them for $10 or so at flea markets, but they are getting harder to find.
Given the overlap in scales (12 in-lb=1 ft-lb), the HF 3/8" drive torque wrench is not really needed, since the HF 1/4" and 1/2" cover the range. As you note, there is no beam type Craftsman 1/4" drive wrench, and the resolution of the 3/8" drive beam wrench is 30 in-lbs.
3312 Retail A [harborfreight.com] Thru 8/31 - Rolling Back Prices PLUS 10%, 15% and 20% OFF Entire Order!
NOTE: The % off coupons expire 8/22
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3312 Weekly ITC [harborfreight.com] Thru 8/21
Remember, no running with a scissor lift.
http://www.harborfreig
If you are still having problems getting coupon codes to take in your cart I'd give them a call.
(No doubt someone will chime in and tell me that I'm breaking the cardinal rule of SD by suggesting someone make a call - let the barrage begin...)
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Posting both the .jpg and the .pdf since the .jpg isn't too clear and I wasn't sure how well it would print. The .pdf should print just fine.
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