Are Harbor Freight's Popular Hercules Power Tools Any Good?
The Hercules line is clearly supposed to be the Caesar among Harbor Freight's most recent triumvirate of general tool collections: Warrior, Bauer, and Hercules. Only $10 to $15 separates comparable models from each line, so the low-end Warrior tools are well and truly affordable, and the under-appreciated and well-worth-buying Bauer tools are often a great deal. But a Hercules tool with charger and battery can cost as much as a DeWalt kit. So who, exactly, are Hercules power tools for, and are they any good? It turns out they're for DIYers with more resources and professionals with fewer, and they're a good value for either market.
Harbor Freight has a history of offering occasionally dodgy tools for which the most attractive feature was sometimes the store's no-hassle returns policy. So understandably, there's some resistance to the idea of a moderately high-end tool line. Sure, the Hercules color scheme seems designed to suggest the tools are comparable with higher-end Makita products, and HF often suggests that you compare Hercules tools to DeWalt's — especially if you're asking yourself whether DeWalt power tools are really worth the hefty price tag. But upon closer inspection, Hercules does hold up pretty well.
Hercules: The top of an improving tool lineup
There are more than 100 tools in the Hercules lineup, and some of them are really accessories: drill bits, driver bits, socket adapters, and the like. The quality of these is occasionally spectacular but overall very uneven. For example, great demolition and framing blades for circular saws, but Torx driver bits are middling at best. It's a strange way to shepherd a brand toward acceptance as a high-quality platform, and that appears to be what Harbor Freight is aiming for. Ten years ago, HF's power tool lineup consisted mostly of Chicago Electric products. Pro Tool Reviews has Chicago Electric reviews dating back to 2009, and the overall sentiment is that they were 5-out-of-10 quality tools that graduated to 9-of-10 because of ridiculously low prices.
Then, in 2017, Stuart from the popular ToolGuyD blog spoke with Harbor Freight and came away convinced that the company's direction, and in particular its Hercules line, was being driven toward more of a quality focus, up to and including pro-quality, reliable gear. This interview, and others like it, illustrate a new push by HF to be better than expectations via products like Hercules power tools. A Harbor Freight marketing person told YouTuber DIY with Dave that their tools have improved a lot in recent years. They added that some of the store's lingering negative reputation has to do with consumers' habits of buying "under-spec" tools and expecting too much from them, leading to lower overall expectations of HF brands.
From low expectations to high regard
Those low expectations are a problem inasmuch as the tool-obsessed community of Harbor Freight skeptics will inevitably see any failures as evidence that the products are sub-par. When YouTube engineer AvE did a teardown of a Hercules drill/driver, he was fair and sometimes pleasantly surprised. But he identified two likely failure points (transistors without good heat dissipation and a small, insufficient cooling fan) and claimed the tool was more likely to last 100 hours than the usual 300. But other reviewers, like Red at Den of Tools, defend Hercules products. The common comparisons with other tool brands might be a sign that Hercules is ascending. Such comparisons, simply laughed at a decade ago, are taken seriously today because the HF tools have (at least at the upper tier where Hercules resides) eclipsed the needs of a majority of the homeowner market. Calling Hercules a "pro" line is now a serious claim.
YouTube auto mechanic MegaMilesBen says that after a year of heavy use, he's experienced no issues with his Hercules tools, including the batteries and charger. There are a lot of testimonials like MegaMilesBen's to be found, but the biggest clue to Hercules' quality might be found in Harbor Freight's warranty. While the very good Bauer products enjoy only a 90-day limited warranty, brushless Hercules tools get a 5-year limited warranty. This is competitive with most high-end power tools, and it shows HF's increasing confidence in asserting the quality of Hercules power tools.