Harbor Freight has a reputation for selling budget-friendly tools and materials that tend to be significantly more affordable than those that you would find on the shelves at big-box hardware stores like Home Depot or Lowes. Part of the way that the retailer has managed to achieve this is by essentially being its own manufacturer. Harbor Freight owns a majority of the brands that make the products it sells in its stores, including names like Bauer, Icon, and Predator. These brands produce tools that are often marketed as affordable alternatives to other popular products made by competing brands.

This can be a fine line to walk, legally speaking. Harbor Freight can produce these products and market them as alternatives, but the company has to be careful about how similar it makes them. Copying a design too closely, as well as any infringement on copyrighted technology, can open the company up to legal ramifications from the competitors that its tools are seeking to replace.

This is precisely the grounds upon which Snap-on sued the company back in 2016 over the production of its 3-Ton Low-Profile Superduty Floor Jack. This tool was made as part of its Daytona brand and sold at less than half the cost of its competitor. Snap-on claimed the device was "substantially identical in shape and appearance" to its FJ300 3-Ton Floor Jack. With that in mind, you might be interested to learn more about how these two products actually stack up on paper, what provoked Snap-on to pursue legal action, and what the outcome of the suit was.