5 Foldable Finds From Harbor Freight That Can Help Save Space In The Garage






It’s easy to lose track of how much space you have in the garage. When your vehicles aren’t in there, it can look like tons of room for all kinds of automotive gear, tools for around the home, and any other odds and ends you can’t find a place for in your house. But it can fill up fast. Especially if you have a couple of cars, bikes, or scooters in there too.

If you find yourself fighting for room in your garage, then you have some options. You could try decluttering and organizing everything in there with some smart DIY storage magic, or invest in a top-rated storage system from a major retailer. Alternatively, you could plan which gear you buy in advance before you wind up in that situation, or even replace some of your more bulky or clunky items with some foldable alternatives. If you want to try the latter, then Harbor Freight might just about have you covered.

Exactly what you can expect to find at Harbor Freight depends a little on where you’re based, or if you’re able to head in-store to pick it up. That’s because some items can’t be shipped to select states like Alaska or Hawaii, while other items are only available if you go in person. What you can expect to find also hinges a little on what you use your garage for. For example, you might want the tools or gadgets that only come out on rainy days to stay in your garage, or you might find that you need some ergonomically desired automotive gear for when you want to work on your ride.

Haul-Master heavy-duty folding trailer

Trailers aren’t exactly anything you can put away easily. Even on the smaller side of things, they can be large, cumbersome devices that can be tough to find a home for. One way you can ease the pain of trying to find a suitable place to keep your trailer is by opting for a folding trailer, like this Haul-Master trailer from Harbor Freight. Despite the fact that it can tow up to 1,720 pounds at a time, it can fold all the way down to about 24 by 63 inches, or less than two by five-and-a-half feet. Admittedly, that’s not the smallest amount of floor space if you’re really stuck for room — but if you need a trailer and want to economize your garage space the best you can, then it’s a solid choice. Especially considering how large trailers can easily be.

Haul-Master’s heavy-duty foldable trailer is made out of a steel frame with built-in slots for stake siding and a tiltable trailer bed. The frame is finished with a red baked enamel coating, and comes with two 5.3 by 12-inch diameter tires. When assembled and unfolded, the whole trailer comes to just shy of 5 feet long, 16 feet wide, and just over 2 feet high. Something that’s worth keeping in mind, though, is its weight: even before you load it up, it weighs almost 260 pounds. So, even though it’s compact when folded, it could still be tricky to move around your garage.

Franklin foldable hand truck

Sometimes you’re going to find yourself needing to move something that’s just a little too awkward to lift and carry around, like a washing machine, freezer, or some other kind of big, clunky appliance. In those cases, you might find yourself wishing you had a hand truck or trolley lying around. But, if you don’t use it often, then having something little, light, and easy to fold away when you’re done is the most useful choice. One pick that could fold away neatly in your garage when you aren’t using it is Franklin’s foldable hand truck.

The hand truck is made out of a lightweight aluminum frame, which can fold away to fit in tight spaces when it’s not in use. When empty, it weighs roughly eight pounds, making it easy to move around or lift without too much heft. Don’t be fooled by its relatively small size — it can still manage to tow up to 150 pounds. It comes with a 19.5 by 16 inch toeplate, and sits on two 7 1/4-inch wheels. 

Based on the product reviews, users are pretty happy with the hand truck across the board. It has more than 2,400 five-star ratings, with 95% of more than 3,100 customers sharing that they’d recommend the item. Many of those reviews highlight how quick and easy the truck is to fold away, along with how easy it makes it to move around all kinds of items, ranging from big flat-screen TVs to carloads of groceries. It’s not all good reviews, of course — a handful of comments note that the truck could be more robust and maneuverable — but they’re in the minority, with under 150 three-star or fewer reviews overall.

Franklin portable telescopic ladder

Sometimes a garage is a little less of a place to work on your car, and a little more of a place to keep useful household items alongside your car. If that sounds like your garage, then you might be able to free up a little room in there by replacing your regular ladder with a portable, telescopic option. 

According to the Harbor Freight product listing, this Franklin portable telescoping ladder can reach heights of up to 14 feet while supporting up to 250 pounds. The ladder extends one foot at a time, making it easy for you to know exactly how much you’re going to need to extend (or distend) it by while getting set up to reach your desired height. As well as its impressive extension abilities, you can also fold it away to about 2.5 feet — or 31 inches — when you’re ready to pack it away again, making it a solid option for smaller garages, tight spaces, or anywhere that you’re already storing a lot of stuff. However, there is a catch: a couple of reviews note that the 14-foot size refers to the maximum reach, meaning it could work out to be a little shorter expected.

Maximum heights aside, the customer reviews on this one are generally pretty great. At the time of writing, the ladder has a 4.6 out of 5-star average based on more than 1,600 reviews, with less than 15% of those ratings giving it three stars or less. A lot of the top reviews praise the ladder’s compact size and ease of use, particularly when it comes to folding it down for storage. So, you don’t need to worry about it being a pain to put away when you’re done with it.

Pittsburgh foldable engine stand

An engine stand isn’t a necessity in every garage, but if you find yourself working on or repairing vehicles often, then it could be useful to keep one around. As useful as they can be, they aren’t exactly small pieces of kit. They need to be able to hold engines in a way that allows you to easily access basically any part of it at any given moment, after all. They need to be robust and a decent size to be able to do so. Pittsburgh’s foldable engine stand can hold up to 2,000 pounds of weight when fully set up, while also being suitable to fold up and slide away in the corner of your garage when you don’t need it.

Pittsburgh’s red foldable engine stand sits at 34.5 inches tall, and around 35 inches wide. Front to back, the stand is 42.5 in length. According to its quite favorable user reviews, it folds away small, thanks to its smart design, making it easy to keep out of the way when you aren’t working on your engine. The stand is also highly adjustable, with a rotating engine mount and four different engine arms, meaning you can set it up, or pack it away, pretty much any way you might want to. 

There is something to keep in mind about having an engine stand in your garage — and that’s the fact that you won’t be able to lift your engine into the stand without another piece of gear. So, if you want one, you’re also going to need to get something like an engine hoist or shop crane. That’ll take up a little extra space in your garage, although it doesn’t have to be much.

Pittsburgh one-ton foldable shop crane

As well as the aforementioned engine stand, Pittsburgh also offers a couple of foldable shop cranes that you could slip into your garage. One type that Harbor Freight has available is a one-ton capacity foldable shop crane, which matches the company’s foldable engine stand. Using this, you can hoist your engine out of your vehicle and onto your engine stand ready for you to get to work without anything else getting in the way. And, of course, you can fold it up and put it aside afterward without it hogging up too much of your garage’s precious floor space.

The total size of a shop crane is adjustable by design, with different parts of it extending or folding so that it can safely shift your engine, or anything else you want to move around, within reason, around your workspace. On top of that, this one also sits on foldable legs, making it easier to store than some of the more static alternatives available on the market. Thankfully, the foldable elements of the crane don’t seem to have impacted its durability or sturdiness, based on customer reviews. That makes sense, considering that the crane is crafted out of steel, and weighs just under 150 pounds. Besides commending the crane’s durability and quality, a lot of the listing’s reviews also note that the crane is easy to assemble out of the box.

How we figured out which products to include

We kept a few things in mind while picking out products to help make the most of space in your garage. For starters, and perhaps most evidently, we only looked at products available from Harbor Freight. Then, we took a look at any items that either checked the “Foldable” box on the product listing page, or that mentioned having foldable elements in the product description. And, of course, we made sure that every product was something you might actually want to keep in your garage, like tools that only get used once in a blue moon or car maintenance-related gear.

We also made sure to keep a close eye on user ratings for each product. To make sure that any products shared are generally considered favorably and useful to those who have purchased it, we didn’t consider any products that had an average rating of lower than four stars. In fact, at the time of writing, all products have a rating of at least four out of five stars. As it stands, every product listed here actually has an average of at least 4.4 stars. To make sure that the average wasn’t representative of a noisy minority, and actually reflected how most consumers felt, we only considered products with at least 200 reviews. Similarly, we also made sure to only list products that were recommended by at least 90% of users who wrote a review.





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The Windows Insider Program is about to get much easier

Ed Bott / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

  • Microsoft is making the Insider Program less complicated.
  • Beta channel will be a more reliable preview of the next retail release.
  • Other changes will allow testers to quickly enable/disable new features.

Last month, Microsoft took official notice of its customers’ many complaints about Windows 11. Pavan Davaluri, the executive vice president who runs the Windows and Devices group, promised sweeping changes to Windows 11. Today, the company announced the first of those changes in a post authored by Alec Oot, who’s been the principal group product manager for the Windows Insider Program since January 2024.

Those changes will streamline the Insider program, which has lost sight of its original goals in the past few years. (For a brief history of the program and what had gone wrong, see my post from last November: “The Windows Insider Program is a confusing mess.”)

Also: If Microsoft really wants to fix Windows 11, it should do these four things ASAP

If you’re currently participating in the Windows Insider Program, these are meaningful changes. Here’s what you can expect.

Simplifying the Insider channel lineup

Throughout the Windows 11 era, signing up for the Insider program has required choosing one of four channels using a dialog in Windows Settings. Here’s what those options look like today on one of my test PCs.

insider-program-channels-lineup-old

The current Insider channel lineup is confusing, to say the least.

Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET

Which channel should you choose? As the company admitted in today’s post, “the channel structure became confusing. It was not clear what channel to pick based on what you wanted to get out of the program.”

The new lineup consists of two primary channels: Experimental and Beta. The Release Preview channel will still be available, primarily for the benefit of corporate customers who want early access to production builds a few days before their official release. That option will be available under the Advanced Options section.

windows-insider-channel-lineup-new

This simplified lineup is easier to follow. Beta is the upcoming retail release, Experimental is for the adventurous.

Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft

Here’s Microsoft’s official description of what’s in each channel now, with the company’s emphasis retained:

  • Experimental replaces what were previously the Dev and Canary channels. The name is deliberate: you’re getting early access to features under active development, with the understanding that what you see may change, get delayed, or not ship at all. We’ve heard your feedback that you want to access and contribute to features early in development and this is the channel to do that.
  • Beta is a refresh of the previous Beta Channel and previews what we plan to ship in the coming weeks. The big change: we’re ending gradual feature rollouts in Beta. When we announce a feature in a Beta update and you take that update, you will have that feature. You may occasionally see small differences within a feature as we test variations, but the feature itself will always be on your device.

These changes will apply to the Windows Insider Program for Business as well.

Offering a choice of platforms

For those testers who want to tinker with the bleeding edge of Windows development, a few additional options will be available in the Experimental channel. These advanced options will allow you to choose from a platform that’s aligned to a currently supported retail build. Currently, that’s Windows 11 version 25H2 or 26H1, with the latter being exclusively for new hardware arriving soon with Snapdragon X2 Arm chips.

Also: Microsoft account vs. local account: How to choose

There will also be a Future Platforms option, which represents a preview build that is not aligned to a retail version of Windows. According to today’s announcement, this option is “aimed at users who are looking to be at the forefront of platform development. Insiders looking for the earliest access to features should remain on a version aligned to a retail build.”

windows-insider-advanced-options-new

The Future Platforms option is the equivalent of the current Canary channel

Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft

Minimizing the chaos of Controlled Feature Rollout

Last month, I urged Microsoft to stop using its Controlled Feature Rollout technology, especially for builds in the Beta channel. Apparently, someone in Redmond was listening.

One of the most common questions we receive from Insiders is “why don’t I have access to a feature that’s been announced in a WIP blog?” This is usually due to a technology called Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR), a gradual process of rolling out new features to ensure quality before releasing to wider audiences. These gradual rollouts are an industry standard that help us measure impact before releasing more broadly. But they also make your experience unpredictable and often mean you don’t get the new features that motivated many of you to join the Insider program to begin with.

Moving forward, Insider builds in the Beta channel will no longer suffer from this gradual rollout of features. Meanwhile, the company says, “Insiders in the Experimental channel will have a new ability to enable or disable specific features via the new Feature Flags page on the Windows Insider Program settings page.”

windows-insider-feature-flags

Builds in the Experimental channel will include the option to turn new features on or off.

Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft

Not every feature will be available from this list, but the intent is to add those flags for “visible new features” that are announced as part of a new Insider build.

Making it easier to change channels

The final change announced today is one I didn’t see coming. Historically, leaving the Windows Insider Program or downgrading a channel (from Dev to Beta, for example) has required a full wipe and reinstall. That’s a major hurdle and a big impediment to anyone who doesn’t have the time or technical skills to do that sort of migration.

Also: Why Microsoft is forcing Windows 11 25H2 update on all eligible PCs

Beginning with the new channel lineup, it should be easier to change channels or leave the program without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

To make this a more streamlined and consistent experience, we’re making some behind the scenes changes to enable Insider builds to use an in-place upgrade (IPU) to hop between versions. This will allow in most cases Insiders to move between Experimental, Beta, and Release Preview on the same Windows core version, or leave the program without a clean install. An IPU takes a bit more time than your normal update but migrates your apps, settings, and data in-place.

If you’ve chosen one of the future platforms from the Experimental channel, those options don’t apply. To move back to a supported retail platform, you’ll need to do a clean install.

Also: Apple, Google, and Microsoft join Anthropic’s Project Glasswing to defend world’s most critical software

The upshot of all these changes should make things a lot clearer for anyone trying to figure out what’s coming in the next big feature update. Beta channel updates, for example, should offer a more accurate preview of what’s coming in the next big feature update, so over the next month or two we should get a better picture of what’s coming in the 26H2 release, due in October.

When can we start to see those changes rolling out to the general public? Stay tuned.





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