The trick is to just look at the stuff closely and use your head to see if it looks decent. Usually, cheap tools will look, well, cheap. The do have some decent non-powered stuff at HF (I recently purchased some rubber-covered four-inch wheels, and I have a digital caliper that works fine), but I would be suspicious of some of their power tools. They have a compound slider that looks cheap to me, and at one time they had a jointer/planer that looked dangerous to use. I once was on the hunt for some new feather guides and the ones they had were jokes. They have some cheap, plastic-head clamps that work OK, but you cannot use them to clamp tightly. I had the handle break right off of one a while back, and I was not squeezing the grip all that hard.
Howard Ferstler
