Are Harbor Freight's Jack Stands Worth Buying? Here's What Reviews Say

As Warren Buffett famously says, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." This is probably most true when lives are at stake and safety means taking everything seriously — every mark on a tool company's reputation, for example. If you've ever jacked up a car and slid underneath to change its oil, say, or replace a wheel-speed sensor, you were probably suddenly very concerned with the reputation of whoever made your jack and jack stands.

So in 2020 when Harbor Freight, in cooperation with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, recalled 1.65 million 3- and 6-ton jack stands because of the potential to fail and cause vehicles to drop unexpectedly, people took it seriously. The failures were unusual, caused by worn tooling at the manufacturing plant in China. But things got even worse when one of the replacement jack stands offered to customers was also recalled due to dangerously flawed welds. But it might, understandably, make anyone shopping for jack stands give Harbor Freight a pass.

Recalls happen. Home Depot recently recalled pools, and a number of Costco offerings have been recalled. And all the dangers of lithium-ion batteries, including recalls, have surely hurt the battery industry's reputation. But if Harbor Freight's recall damaged its reputation, that doesn't necessarily mean there are any real problems with their current jack stands. But even if they operate perfectly, it might still be reasonable to choose another brand to stay on the safe side. It's always worthwhile to know if there's evidence behind your purchasing decisions, so we took a look at the reviews for Harbor Freight's current jack stand offerings.

The seven jack stand models currently sold under Harbor Freight's Daytona and Pittsburgh brands are very highly rated by customers, garnering 4.9 or 4.8 stars. The stands are recommended by 97 to 100% of purchasers, depending on the model. And since we're talking about 7,977 reviews, obviously the vast majority and a large number of ratings were extremely positive. But there were a handful of common complaints in the mix.

Four of the seven models had reviewers who noted that the stands wobble when in use, usually because of uneven legs. "The set I bought rocked a little on flat concrete floor, but still worked good under heavy load," wrote one customer on Harbor Freight's website, who nonetheless gave the Daytona 12 Ton Heavy Duty Ratcheting Jack Stand four stars. Three models had reviewers who experienced a failure of a jack stand, and a one-star reviewer of the Daytona 3 Ton Heavy Duty Ratcheting Jack Stand said, "Glad I was nowhere near the vehicle when the product failed." Purchasers of three of the models complain that the stands' capacity ratings are based on a pair of jack stands combined, not the weight-holding ability of a single stand. One three-star reviewer on Harbor Freight's website called the resulting rating "wildly misleading." The reviewer went on to note that the Esco jack stands to which the Daytona stands are compared are rated individually at 3 tons, while the Daytona model achieves this by adding up the capacities of two stands. But are these few complaints and a bunch of glowing reviews the whole story about Harbor Freight's current jack stands?

To find these commonalities, we tabulated all of the one-, two-, and three-star reviews for Harbor Freight jack stands, and many of the four- and five-star reviews as well. But consumer reviews, even from verified purchasers, often fail to tell the whole story about a product. Some rate products they haven't even used yet, some experienced rare failures, and sometimes the reviews are aggregated in such a way that the overall ratings don't really represent the feelings of the average purchaser. And sometimes reviewers are just plain wrong. It turns out that uneven legs are very common for jack stands, and rarely contribute to instability. And most manufacturers combine weight limits for a pair of stands into a single published capacity rating, so if that's a valid critique, it's a valid critique of most jack stands on the market today.

So we supplemented the consumer reviews with the stellar work of Todd Osgood of the Project Farm YouTube channel, who put 3-ton Daytona and Pittsburgh stands and a 6-ton Daytona stand to the test against 19 competing models. Tested for the force required to tip the stand over under load, leg evenness, how they handled a simulated asphalt surface (jack stands can sink into hot asphalt if not properly designed), and failure load, the Harbor Freight stands performed about average on every test and demonstrated no alarming tendencies toward failure. All of the stands performed around the middle of the pack with regard to forward and side-to-side tip-over force, showed good weld quality and pads to prevent asphalt sink, and "easily exceeded" their weight ratings.