Exactly How Strong are Ball Joint Presses? Harbor Freight vs Amazon PT1

[Music] welcome back to the torque test channel and welcome to the first episode of our new press test series where we use a 100 ton ram 2000 foot-pound milwaukee one-inch drive d-handle or both to test really anything you guys want c-clamps automotive pullers or in today's case and for the next couple pt episodes ball joint presses with plenty of data along the way in the form of hardness testing weight measuring deflection and the almighty power figures if we were to test all the brands of ball joint pullers that we know of this video would have been longer than a csi episode so suggest the ball joint brand that you've had luck with in the comments and we'll put some of your top suggestions in our episode number two today for our debut episode we're going to test what are likely the best selling ball joint puller sets in the us the first example being from harbor freight donning their pricier maddox name model ma10-1 their previous pittsburgh set was famously garbage and would bend if you look too hard at it so we're interested in how this pricier option from the store holds up at 90 dollars and most of their coupons being put it's legitimately one of the pricier options on the market what is very much not a pricey option is our other ball joint set headed for death row the orion motor tech eight five four two zero three five three three six which goes for forty seven dollars this is the best selling ball joint press on amazon and not only that the second best-selling ball joint kit is also orion mojitek just in a blue case and the third is the same but in a black case and even the fourth best selling is orion but in their master set orientation and every one of them is a picture of a 3d rendering of the product instead of an actual picture they seem a bit bashful to show what they're getting but they are getting a whole lot of sales as a matter of fact seven of the top 10 products in this category are all omt our red case version looks decent enough a little chipped up and not as nice as the maddox but they must sell as many as they do for a reason right the reviews of these are overall pretty positive so are those just diy guys using it once on a newer vehicle that isn't going to take a lot of force or people who actually give these the beans today we're going to find out and we'll be finding out with the help of our new 2868-20 milwaukee one inch d handle which advertises a cool 2 000 foot pounds of ball joint busting torque on this channel's next video you'll be finding out just how much this guy can make on our dyno using the battery it's hd kit comes with but for today let's just say it's probably enough to push these presses to their limits another ally in our fight to punish these presses is the fpy-1001 100 metric ton hydraulic ram we picked up if 220 000 pounds of force isn't high enough to register these tools limits then we're calling it quits on this whole youtube thing but this won't be doing the heavy lifting as much as it will really just be registering it i'll show you what i mean it's going to be mounted to this angle iron which is then clamped by the vice to sort of support it the ram gets bolted onto here filled up with hydraulic fluid then we expose the ram face a few millimeters by using a hydraulic pump then we slap one of our custom unit conversion gauges onto it one of the pricey ones our dyno uses then with some simple math by measuring the cylinder bore of the ram then taking that measurement and converting it into piston face area you're able to enter that into a calculator along with the max 10k psi this ram is rated for and see the 100 metric tons to confirm we're measuring something correctly with that same process you're then able to determine what one psi should look like and that equals 22.1805 pounds on our setup we then enter this into the gauge and set it up for pounds so it's going to spit out pounds on this gauge when we abuse it in this case we're limited to how many units we could put in front of the decimal point so it's set up for 2.218 instead of 22. you still with me basically we add a zero at the end of whatever this gauge says it should be pretty spot on here's an example with the hand c clamp which we can also test the failure for you guys if you want we can max it out by hand and get 85 from the gauge which means 850 pounds of clamping force you may be wondering with the ram and the gauge why not just pump up this thing until a press splits in half and then you have your number well we want to know how much you would generate at home in force with an impact wrench or by hand if you need to to do that these need to be tested with the four screw installed by impacting on the force screw like you would be at home or at work it's not a lot of use if the press is good to 50 000 pounds of force but the bolt bends strips or breaks off at only 10 000 pounds this process has the added benefit of controlling for the press bending we'll be measuring how well the tool takes impacts from this end and turns it into ball joint busting power on this end any input here that's instead wasted on turning the press into a pretzel won't be registered here if the gauge starts to drop rather than climb all of your impact effort is either being squandered by the force bolt killing itself or the press material yielding having a beefy tool that's not easily ruined is good and all but if getting a ball joint out is the goal of these tools we want to measure how much output it's creating given a certain amount of input a tool that flexes might come back to shape when you're done but ultimately not super useful by wasting those input torques so that we're not just going full rambo mode on these tools and destroying them within the first couple seconds which you would probably not be doing at home and not be able to relate to we'll be punishing these with increasing levels of power here's what that looks like using an xc 6.0 for weight reasons because we're testing this all day and to limit power for now here's what setting one looks like on this tool that's 257 or roughly the equivalent of a rigid mid torque and what it can generate in this 5 second test setting 2 is only about 297 so we'll be skipping that in our testing as it's too close here's setting 3. [Applause] 469 or about in ir 2235 ti max worth or cobalt xtr if you're using cordless here's setting four 670 this time and this short of a test the closest to that would be well the other one inch from milwaukee the 2867-20 that will take you north of 1000 if you want to go there the last test we'll be setting for with an hd 12.0 battery which well could be the moon torque wise nothing else really compares to that just keep in mind that we're going until the end of this four step process or until the press is no longer outputting any extra force to keep things comparable between the tools let's get into the testing up first we have the best-selling orion motor tech from amazon before and after each test we're going to measure from the press to the ram housing to indicate deflection or half of that deflection theoretically the big bruiser setting set to 1 which is akin to a rigid octane mid torque with an octane battery let's see how she does remembering to add a zero at the end of this gauge that peaked at eleven thousand five hundred pounds of force and deflection looks to be about nothing is that good well we won't know until we have a look at the harbor freight medics so here's that zeroing out the caliper [Applause] that's 14 000 pounds of force a rigid mid torque would be able to generate with this tool and about one millimeter of deflection or two millimeters total that's more bend than the zero we saw with the orion but it's also pushing the ball joint with 2500 pounds more than the orion here as well neither of these tools are close to failing yet so let's continue starting where we left off with the orion let's give her 2235 ti max worth of beans and see how she likes that that increases force output from eleven thousand five hundred to sixteen thousand three fifty or so now passing where the matics left off but at the cost of bending under load by 1.6 millimeters or about 3.2 total let's see the maddox now that perked things right up 26 100 at its peak or so and if you have a 2235 ti max cobalt high torque or above this one seemingly will put out some pounds looks like at the cost of 2.8 millimeters here this time 5.6 millimeters total again more than the orion but putting out a whole lot more juice in the process with roughly the same input let's crank things up to the top setting now with the power similar to a 2867 one inch on the orion looks like it grew from 16k to 17850 or so doesn't seem like a whole lot some of that input torque was turned into bending though and it grew to three millimeters or six millimeters total here's a harbor freight from where it left off 35 800 pounds from the maddox now fully doubling the orion amazon model is putting out with the same settings and it's now grown to five and a quarter millimeter or 10.5 total in its bending though beginning to get a bit worried there let's crank things up to 11 with an hd 12.0 battery and just kill both of these with whatever is their preferred method of failure here's the orion so this one only really ever got up to 20 20 200 or so it fell from there and we weren't even able to get it ever any higher than that it grew to 6.3 millimeters or twelve and a half total so that's where the additional impacting went into really reshaping this tool despite doing about half the actual work that the harbor freight did it's well and truly bent for good now and you'll be able to tell right away when you try to put this thing back into a case the maddox is a different yet equally tragic story you may have noticed our hand movements in the last clip that's because the force crew took on a whole new shape after that run it tweaked in a new trajectory repeated attempts after this to increase his clamping force as you see over test number four did not yield any gains and it was not able to improve its previous score the threads looked mostly fine but was certainly no longer living a straight lifestyle here's a recap of how each tool did with their respective runs and gaps in between to switch power settings and measure deflection it's not very close when you look at things this way even though they both sort of met their demise although we sort of wish they did so in a more dramatic albeit more life-threatening way just for entertainment purposes to try to understand these results let's take a little deeper look into how they were made and maybe deduce some answers from that note these measurements were all taken before the testing when we're talking simply weights the orion motor tech weighs 6.95 pounds and the harbor freight weighs 6.63 but as you probably have figured out it's not all about mass based on the performance we've seen one of these could be made from recycled bottle caps for all we know when taking a peek at their hardness we're going to do so on its spine and for screw locations we start to get to the core differences here the harbor freight measures 32.3 rockwell c at the four-screw location and 33-34 at the spine anything around this 30 rc range and above means it's at least made out of some type of perhaps hardenable or forgeable carbon steel like 1045 perhaps something alloyed like 5130 or 5140 but if so in that case not a very hard version of that but likely not the top echelon stuff like 4140 chromoly or 6150 chrome vanadium which would normally be in the 40s at least if you're aiming for its peak strength characteristics the orion is a another story altogether we could not get a reading off of any part of this thing which means it's under the range of our hardness tester which usually starts around 18 to 20 or so in our findings that's the hardness of the steel plate that this tool is resting on aka nada zip it has a spine like this thing was forged but if it was forged it is so out of mild steel or something equally not impressive you may be thinking well that non-impressiveness still had to take on a dang one-inch m18 impact but here's the deflection under stress from a harbor freight earthquake impact keep in mind we're doing four to five second runs here these tools usually see longer in each go and for much more than four times in their life the harbor freight looked tweaked a bit but otherwise still in better shape than omt here's a snapshot of our results and how we'll list these in our next episode where we test the top ball joint press brands from the comment section below feel free to leave your suggestion there or suggestions of what other tools you'd like to see us break on a setup like this one since this list includes a whole two presses we can't really recommend the maddox until we test more who knows maybe a rusted ball joint really takes 40 000 pounds to press out and this isn't up to the task either way with most high torques and full size impacts on the market this maddox shown here in test 2 will be doing more for you than the orion motor tech does maxing out a 1 inch d handle all those positive reviewers may not have ruined their tool but i bet a lot of them mysteriously came up against some super stuck ball joints when in reality this tool is just soaking up all the impacting work into its soft creamy center subscribe to stay tuned for when this m18 behemoth hits the dyno and she hits it pretty hard too thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Torque Test Channel

Views: 92,324

Rating: 4.9600124 out of 5

Keywords: harbor freight, 2868-20, 2869-20, d-handle, d handle, 2000, largest impact, most powerful impact, OMT, Orion Motor Tech, Orion ball joint press, ball joints, best ball joint press, astro, snap-on, snap on, bjp1, OTC

Id: Gw_ePOeOXcY

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021