10 Harbor Freight Tools Every At-Home Woodworker Will Want

Woodworking is a notoriously expensive hobby. In addition to the ever-higher price of lumber itself, the cost of tools and shop equipment can really add up. While some purists insist on only buying premium tools at woodworking shops, this can come at a pretty hefty price. Whether you're new to the craft and not willing to sink a lot of money into fitting out a shop right away or just on a budget, there are often cheaper options that can lower the cost of woodworking quite considerably.

For anybody who works with tools, the name Harbor Freight stands for low prices. Their parking lot tent sales and magazine ads offer rock-bottom prices on a wide array of different tools. But what are you really getting for those low prices? While some turn up their noses at the bargain basement retailer, others of us know that there are a lot of great values to be found at Harbor Freight if you're willing to do a bit of testing and research. Sometimes, you can find a lot of value for not a lot of money.

To help you decide which buys are good, we've compiled the top 10 Harbor Freight tools every at-home woodworker will want. Some of these offer comparable performance to more expensive options found elsewhere. Others, while maybe not quite as good as the competition, are tools that you don't necessarily use very often and may not be worth a big investment.

As any woodworker knows, even high-quality "finished" lumber rarely comes perfectly straight and flat from the yard. To correct this, every shop needs a planer to smooth down and even out the wood surface, giving you a good, flat place to start building. It's also instrumental in reducing thickness to achieve uniform boards of the desired depth. The Bauer 12-1/2 inch Portable Thickness Planer is something of a basic unit and not the most feature-rich planer on the market. And like most entry-level planers, you can encounter a bit of snipe when the wood isn't perfectly aligned.

Despite its shortcomings, this benchtop planer is an indispensable part of any wood shop that fits the bill and planes boards flat. This is especially true for those who don't have room in the budget for models costing at least three times as much as this one's $349.99 price tag. With Harbor Freight's frequent sales, coupons, and member discounts, it's often available for even less, making this a good buy for anyone in need of a basic planer.

It's a shame Harbor Freight doesn't sell a bench joiner to compliment this inexpensive route to squaring off perfectly flat boards. This can be fixed using a table saw or even a simple circular saw, provided that you have a good, flat surface like this planer can provide.

Few benchtop tools cost less than their portable equivalent, but at $49.99, this handy little 1-in belt sander is just that. And there's a lot of value packed into this tiny little unit. It fits handily on a shelf or under the workbench, making it easy to pull out when you need it and convenient to store away when you don't.

The light-duty sander does double duty in the woodworking shop. It's incredibly useful for sanding irregular workpieces and rounded details on complicated work or anything smaller than what you'd want to take a handheld belt sander to. This YouTube review shows how useful it can be for getting into tight spaces and shaping curves on a precise wooden sculpture.

On top of its uses for precise wood sanding, this sander is perhaps even more useful for shaping and sharpening metal. While we're not talking about metalworking tools in this article, woodworking requires maintaining a lot of chisels, gouges, plane irons, and carving knives. All of these hand tools (and a lot of power tools as well) require sharpening and correcting the occasional chip or deformation. This little sander is a great tool for this purpose, setting you up with a reasonably powerful sharpening station when you want it and tucking it out of the way when you don't. This knife-making YouTube channel even used one to make a knife out of a file. It is not the perfect tool for a metalworker, but it is just what a woodworker needs.

Some tools see pretty constant use in the workshop. Table saws and miter saws, for example, see action in just about any woodworking project, as do drills, sanders, and routers. When buying these workhorses, there's a strong argument for buying the best you can afford, as high-quality tools last longer and yield a far better experience, as well as a better-finished product.

But then there are the "one-trick ponies," the single-use tools that do one specific job and pretty much nothing else. For tools like these, it makes sense to ask whether the best you can buy is necessary. The biscuit joiner is one such tool, which spends a lot more time on the shelf than it does being used. It serves one straightforward purpose: cutting slots in workpieces for joining with small wooden biscuits. While there are alternatives to this, including the more traditional dowels, jig-drilled pocket screws, or Festool's DOMINO system, biscuits do a good job of lining up and bonding boards into a single panel for table tops, as well as making miter joints more secure.

A single-use tool full of great uses, this one makes clean and neat biscuit cuts for smooth and simple joinery. If you use biscuits all the time in a variety of projects, you may want a better tool. For most of us, however, this one is a solid buy.

We've already seen one belt sander, so why another one? Simply put, this bandfile sander, also known as a finger sander, goes where no other tool can go. Like a handheld jigsaw, it has the versatility to get into spaces that are difficult or impossible to reach with another tool. Also, like a jigsaw, it's not the preferred tool for a variety of applications. We wouldn't necessarily suggest going to Harbor Freight for a lot of your mainstay power tools, and that includes belt, orbital, or finishing sanders. But for a highly specialized tool like this one, albeit one with more uses than you might think, this puts a lot of power in your hand at a very cost-friendly price point.

The bandfile sander is a champ for shaping wood in a variety of applications. This introduction video to the tool — which recommends this Bauer model from Harbor Freight as the powerful and perfectly adequate solution it is — goes into some of the many applications for this convenient tool. Unlike a lot of bandfile sanders, the Bauer is built on an angle grinder chassis, meaning it comes with a lot more power than you'd expect and the greater durability that comes with a heavier-duty tool. Like others on this list, it's a case where you can probably get better tools for more money, but it probably doesn't make sense to do so.

How many clamps should a woodworker have? Just about any woodworker knows the answer to this question: as many as you can get your hands on. But amassing the huge assortment of clamps that you'll find in a well-stocked wood shop can get seriously costly. And when a simple clamp does a simple job, it's a no-brainer to buy a TON of these inexpensive but effective clamps. We have been using Harbor Freight's quick-release clamps for years, and we've never seen one fail. It's a simple matter of a swift and easy machine that does its job well, and the price point is second to none.

While we're highlighting the most commonly used 36-inch size clamp here, Harbor Freight stocks a ton of different clamps that are equally useful, and they are all worth more than their low price might have you believe. For longer lengths, their pipe clamps are made of tough cast iron and attach to a common galvanized pipe, giving you reach rarely seen in a standard manufactured clamp.

We could easily go on — there are angle clamps, band clamps, quick clamps, and c-clamps, all with unique uses. Harbor Freight stocks many sturdy and reliable clamps at a price that makes it affordable to buy as many as you can for all sorts of woodworking projects.