5 Pittsburgh Tools You Should Steer Clear Of (According To Owners)

Discount tool warehouse Harbor Freight is known for its affordable tools that cover a wide array of categories, from woodworking to automotive to basic construction and even welding. These tools are often sold for far less than comparable products sold at big-box stores like Lowes or Home Depot, and in some cases even outperform those pricey alternatives. The Hercules and Icon lines, in particular, stand up to some of the harshest jobs.

However, while you'll find a variety of underrated tools that users swear by, you'll also come across several items that you should think twice about buying from Harbor Freight. And among those items to avoid are Pittsburgh tools and products.

Pittsburgh tools fill a necessary space at Harbor Freight, representing the low end of both price and, sometimes, quality. Not all Pittsburgh products are of poor quality — MMtech Online has written about several of the brand's tools worth buying — but there are more than a few that you should steer clear of, according to users. This list consists of some of the worst-reviewed tools from Pittsburgh, chosen using ratings on Harbor Freight's website along with my own experiences with several of these tools.

Sometimes, you just have a little ding or indentation and want to try to get it out yourself. If you've already tried the compressed air trick for fixing dents, and have moved on to more serious options, you might browse the automotive aisle of your local Harbor Freight. The lane is full of some really useful tools and some questionable ones, and this particular kit falls into the latter category, rarely working well enough to get even the most minimal results.

The lowest-rated Pittsburgh product on the Harbor Freight website is the Pittsburgh Crossbar Dent Repair Kit, which consists of a glue gun, dent lifters, crossbar, glue sticks, release agent, and finishing tool. Unfortunately, the list of user complaints looks a lot like the parts list for the kit itself, in that nearly every component has some way of failing the customer. The glue doesn't adhere, the dent lifters fall apart during use, the crossbar snaps during the tightening process.

While some folks have reported success using this kit, even the best customer reviews offer up different hacks and tips necessary to make the tools actually work as advertised. To me, that's not a five-star review — that's a failure of a product some resourceful users have figured out how to make effective.

There are basically two things you'd expect a tire pressure gauge to do, no matter where you bought the tool: consistently read tire pressure, and stay in one piece during that process. This tool fails at both of those tasks, often reading up to 20 psi higher or 10 psi lower than other gauges. And that's if you get a reading at all — many reviews claim that the tool breaks after a single use.

Most of the problems with the Pittsburgh 110 PSI Dial Tire Pressure Gauge come from its poor design. The small dial and short stem make comfortably pressing the tool into a valve stem on a car, bicycle, truck, or motorcycle nearly impossible. The tool is also entirely made of plastic — something you may not realize if you're ordering the product online. Several customer reviews complain that the plastic parts that press in the valve stem on the tire easily snap off, rendering the tool useless.

On top of cheap construction, the fact that so many users complain about irregular readings leads me to believe that this tool is somehow not even worth the four dollar clearance price it's currently selling for. Do yourself a favor and upgrade to either a fancy digital gauge or even a simple pencil-style tire gauge like I've had in my work shirt for over 15 years.

Brake work is serious work, and sometimes doing it alone can be a pain. Bleeding the brake lines after any service, from a simple brake pad swap to a full caliper replacement, is no maintenance myth — it's best practice for both safety and proper brake function. Unfortunately, if you don't have a tool to get the job done, you almost always need a second person available to pump the brakes as you open and close each bleeder — a process that can be messy and tedious.

The Pittsburgh Brake Bleeder and Vacuum Pump Kit was the first brake bleeder I purchased when I got into the automotive repair industry over a decade ago, and it's almost comforting to read reviews and see that nothing has changed about the tool in over 10 years. That is to say, none of the fittings properly hold a seal, leading to lots of air getting into your system and just a bit of brake fluid draining out. The fittings often don't fit on brake caliper bleeder valves at all, and even when they do, the reservoir's seal also commonly fails.

I ended up modified the hoses themselves to provide a better seal on mine, before giving up and investing in a better tool. While brake fluid replacement can be a pain, it is a lot easier to get the job done with a tool that actually works as intended.

I don't say this often, but I actually hate this tool. Not just "dislike" and far more than "don't recommend" — I harbor a deep resentment for the Pittsburgh Multi-Use Transfer Pump and the people who made it. The seals never work, and any fluid thicker than water will immediately launch the attached tubing off the body of the pump and get all over you, the vehicle you're working on, and the immediate vicinity. It's a bad pump, and after using three different pumps after exchanges and having the same results I'm fairly sure it's not just a "me" problem.

I thought this Pittsburgh Multi-Use Transfer Pump would be a handy tool for jobs like differential fluid exchanges, where there's not enough room to fit a bottle of thick diff fluid above the fill hole of the differential. Instead, the Pittsburgh Multi-Use Transfer Pump would do one of three things when I used it. The inner seals would fail, freezing the hand pump in place and making the tool useless. The hoses on either end of the pump would pop off, spraying fluid everywhere. Or, those same hoses would collapse, since they're too thin to handle highly viscous automotive fluids. Users that tried to drain gas tanks also complain that the pump fails after only one or two uses, blaming failed seals despite advertising photos showing people using their Pittsburgh Transfer Pump for that exact purpose.

One of the best things about Pittsburgh tools is their reasonable prices. It's one of the reasons so many of us try to avoid making an in-person Harbor Freight run — you go in for one thing and come out with a truck bed full of tools. However, that also means that when a tool comes with a price that's a little more expensive, users' expectations rise along with it. After all, $60 is $60, no matter where you're spending it.

The Pittsburgh 24-inch Digital Laser Level with Angle Finder is one such tool, selling for over $50 but rarely working perfectly. The digital readout often doesn't match up with those bubbles, and the laser feature is useless once you get more than a couple feet from the tool — especially in bright light or sunlight. I purchased this level on a whim for a bathroom tiling project I was working on last year, and returned it before I finished the job.