Been a while since I wrote a new tool review for a Harbor Freight tool, honestly it has been a little while since I bought one. My newest acquisition was the Grinder Carver. It had fairly good reviews, and looked like a well made tool. It comes with the motor, a hand piece, a foot pedal, and a 1/4" chuck key. It comes with no accessories which isn't a big deal because if you are like me then you have a hundred of nearly every kind of bit, so it is a non issue.
After I bought it, it was a couple of weeks before I even pulled it out of the box. When I finally got around to opening it, I was pleased to find that it looked well made. After I plugged it in I found that it was very powerful on initial start up, however after a minute of running it the chuck went spinning across the bench. Turns out the chuck presses onto the shaft, similar to how a MT2 spindle presses onto your lathe.
So I fixed that by cleaning the shaft of oil and pressing it back onto the spindle. After a gentle hit to the chuck with a mallet, it was fixed. Soon I has happily removing the waste off of a block that I was carving into a small toy horse for a toddler's christmas present. Suddenly the cable went slinging around the shop and all that was left in my hand was an aluminum tube (the body of the carver hand piece). After taking a moment to reflect on life in general ( a cable slinging around at 15000 RPM and missing your ear by about 2 inches can do that to a fella), I decided to have a look and figure out what went wrong.
At the Motor the cable is bolted to the cable, this held together. The cable housing then screws to the motor as well, part of this was on the floor next to my feet, the other side was still mounted to the motor. The other end of the cable had a "nut" that screwed onto the aluminum tube that was still in my hand. the cable that was at one time still in the housing had just slid into a square hole on the shaft that held the chuck.
So what happened? The cable housing "nut" that attached to the aluminum tube had been threaded onto the tube. This was done with very fine and shallow threads. The pressure of my carving put pressure on the chuck, which in turn put pressure on the shaft, and this put pressure on the last place it could. That was on the shallow machine threads on the cable housing "nut". Needless to say this is what caused the issue, the threads gave up, the cable went slinging round ripping part of the housing off.
What saved me from injury? I was wearing a full face shield, and and form fitting gloves.
So would I recommend this tool to a friend (as Harbor Freight's review system asks)…… Yes. Why you ask? If said friend does a lot of carving and knows about this issue ahead of time, then they would just have to invest $49 and the time putting some small screws through the cable housing "nut" and into the aluminum handle. This would have fixed the problem. I could have exchanged it, but I see that the problem would not be any different on any of the other carvers they had on the shelf. I decided to opt for the return and used the money to buy supplies like sand paper, etc. I'll stick to my dremel and knives for carving.
Enjoyed reading your honest review :)
ReplyDelete