I keep coming across Vevor tools online, such as this 7×14 benchtop metal lathe.
The company looks to be very broadly focused brand, as you can see from their Amazon store.
User reviews for Vevor tools and machinery seem to be mixed, but through repetition I’ve started to take a closer look at their products.
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Many of Vevor’s metalworking machines look to roll out of the same factory as similarly-sized tools sold at Harbor Freight, Grizzly, Little Machine Shop, and other retailers, but at significantly lower prices. Are they worth it?
Yes, I know – I’m supposed to be the one answering that question, but I have largely ignored the brand. They’ve emailed me a couple of times before, offering products for review opportunities, but so far I haven’t responded.
It’s getting difficult to ignore them, however, given how often I now see the tools on Amazon or being promoted on YouTube and social media.
As an aside, it always bugs me when a company emails me with a generic email address, such as “[email protected].” I always like to know who I’m communicating with.
I’m curious about Vevor tools in the same way as with other more value-centric brands, such as Wen and Grizzly, but not enough to factor the brand into any of my purchasing decisions.
I asked a similar question about Wen – What About Wen Tools? – and have heard good feedback about them over the years. Vevor reminds me of Wen and Grizzly, but with a less curated approach.
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To me, it seems that if Vevor can find a supplier, they put their name on it, allowing them to rise above other lesser-known brands doing more or less the same thing.
Vevor had a heavy presence on Amazon, and I’ve also seen their products on Home Depot’s website.
Their slogan is “tough tools, half price” in some places, and “tough equipment, lowest prices” in others.
Have you had any experiences with Vevor tools, good or bad?
MM
Funny you mention it, the name seems to pop up everywhere: I came across an ad for a Vevor branded Drag Harrow about an hour ago. It looked like cheapo flimsy rubbish.
Shane
I’m curious too. I just bought a Vevor brand ultrasonic cleaner. I found it on the shelf in one of those salvage stores, but it was brand new in the box. I haven’t given it a try yet, but it looks pretty well-built, and I am cautiously optimistic.
Ron
I’ve used my vevor sonic cleaner for 6 months and love it. Will buy another soon. I use it for atv parts.
Michael S.
Be careful with that ultrasonic cleaner, some of them are not safe: https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-safety-report-vevor-ultrasonic-cleaners-2205-0322-2205-0324
Scott
I purchased the 3 liter “professional “ version on Amazon last summer. 4th use I set the timer for 4 minutes and the heat to 30 Celsius and after 20 seconds it caught fire. I was past the 30 day return window on Amazon but Vevor was very quick to respond to an email and issued a refund that day
Shane
Whoa! Thanks for the heads up. I know not to leave it unattended to begin with
Jp
Name hasn’t popped up. Maybe because I never searched the term, or any tool which they make a version of. My browser shameless presents products that I searched for recently
David
Samething for me. The moment I click on a particular item, wheather it be the Amazon app or through Chrome browser. It never fails to that I would get pop ups/ ads about the same item or whatever I was previously searching for. Google constantly looking at what I look at
Stuart
It’s not just Google searches.
If you go to a retailer, their ads will follow you around the internet.
Some retailers will also target via social media, such as Facebook or Instagram.
Wayne R.
In a very short period, I saw the never-before Vevor name popping up in a variety of avenues hawking a variety of stuff; that sort of ubiquity doesn’t just happen.
China’s trying a new unified marketing approach to creating a “brand” out of thin air.
Bonnie
The online brand has been around about a decade, the chinese factory since ’07 (assuming the two companies are related). Looks like they’re probably another hybrid white-label brand (ala WEN, but much broader and without aquiring an existing defunt brand). Making some things but then also rebranding everything else under the sun. One step up from the fly-by-night alphabet brands on Amazon.
Not like slapping one logo on a thousand unrelated products in new or uniquely Chinese. Every big box store and catalog seller has done it, even actual manufacturers can have frankly ludicrous breadth (Hitachi made artillery, refrigerators, power tools, laptops, *cutlery*, etc).
Blocky
I considered Vevor for baker scaffolding recently, but I was able to wait on a sale and got the Metaltech from Home Depot for a better price.
dll932
We just bought a Vevor magnetic drill press for about $200. It works fine. You can tell it was made from an adapted 1/2 inch drill. The instructions are some of the most hysterical Engrish I ever read.
Shane
Lol! My instructions cover both “mechanical” and “ ditigal” operations!
eddie sky
and all in that same generic font…times knockoff.
Matt C.
YouTube channel “Den of Tools” did a video on them about a month ago. Sounded like a lot of lawsuits for copyright infringement… His recommendation was to stay clear of them.
Mike
You beat me to it. If the info in his video is real, it’s a hard pass.
DocDawg
Same
Seems to be the same CCP- managed infringement iVe noticed. Quality minimal, but price great. A real dilemma in purchasing
ITCD
Patents and in the Ken Tool case, trademark. Copyright is about creative works. Ken Tool has a registered trademark for using the color blue as a trade dress for tire tools which Vevor infringed on. They have a bunch of other litigation surrounding patents.
Addicted2Red
I’ve used them for like 6 years now. I consider them a step up above the no name chinese clones.
Very very slight step up. Yes its the same oem/factory that makes grizzly/shopfox/rikon and other clones, just a bit less QC than those brands.
Some of the items have been rock solid and packaged well. Bought glass DRO scales for my lathe and mill, no problems with them for years.
Ultrasonic cleaner and 8ton air ram has been good too.
Al
Terrible service. Email from different people with the standard answer: Wait a week. The anvil I ordered disappeared in a UPS warehouse. Had to order my own replacement, than wait for a refund. Took over a month from ordering before I actually received it. Box was thrashed. Had a note from UPS ‘bad packaging’.
I put it next to a similarly-sized anvil I bought from Harbor Freight. The HF is decent in appearance. Makes the Vevor look like a manufacturing reject. Casting is terrible, with pock marks and bad sand mold texture.
I don’t trust them. Out of safety concerns, I’m definitely not going to buy a stair railing, ladder, or cooking appliances.
David Z
It might depend on which one you get. Walter Sorrells just did a Vevor anvil review. He seemed pretty pleased relative to its weight and cost. https://youtu.be/N2HfwoQ8iJw
Al
Yes, he got the free, cherry-picked version reserved for YouTubers. Needs cleaning and dressing. Not saying what I received isn’t worthy of pounding on. Saying that the supplier is not reliable, and customer service for non-reviewers is terrible. Quality is on-par with other cheaply-made stuff from China or India. Not something I’d trust life or limb with. My comparison is with the HF model, which is slightly more expensive. But, it doesn’t require grinding and re-painting. And, when it is in stock, you take it home the same day. Vevor took a month and charged me a price increase for the second one they sent.
If we compare it to the YouTuber review model, I guess the conclusion is maybe I should get a YouTube channel so they’ll send a good one in less than a month?
Walter Sorrell’s review was good. He was lucky to get decent treatment as a reviewer.
Peter Fox
Although I have never bought or used any Vevor branded tools or anything else for that matter, I do have some knowledge from the home shop machinist side.
As you already know all small machine tools are a compromise, they lack the work envelope, mass, and often features that industrial machine have. However far more often than not the compromises are acceptable if you can keep your expectations reasonable.
In the case of small bench lathes (not counting watch makers types) They range from small machines such as the Taig, Sherline, and Unimat. Up to much more serious 10″ to 12″ swing machines from manufacturers such as South-bend, Logan, Atlas, Sheldon , and modern import models. In general the 7×10, 7×12, and 7×14 models are on the smaller end but still quite usable.
I suspect that most of them are made by Seig industrial group out of Shanghai, China. Their C2 or C3 models being the base versions https://www.siegind.com/shop/c2-mini-lathe. It seems that each of the various companies that re-brands them picks their color and the target price range and Seig makes them what they want. As such there is a wide range of quality across the various brands. As with anything in like you get what you pay for. I have had the displeasure of using a Cummins branded 7X12 lathe that a nearby high school robotics team had in their shop once. It was very rough around the edges and had every corner cut from a quality stand point. on the other end of the spectrum Little Machine Shop sells what look to be some very nice well featured version that I have no doubt are well adjusted and ready to run.
One of the good things about there being so many brands and levels of quality is that there is a large community of users and thus a large base of knowledge on how to get the most out of these machines. A helpful comment that has stuck since I was researching my options for a bench-top milling machine 15 years ago, “don’t think of these low cost import machine tools as ready to use machines, think of them as pre-assembled kits”. While quite a bit has changed with companies like Little Machine Shop and Precision Matthews offering and demanding better quality. The thought is still quite valid for most small machine tools. As long as you are aware of the risks and willing to put in the effort to fine tune, upgrade, and in some cases finish the machine, you can get usable equipment and learn a lot in the process. As a starting point upgrading the spindle bearings to decent quality tapered roller type seems like a good starting point if the lathe doesn’t already come with them. If you are not comfortable with doing that it may make more sense to spend more initially.
Personally I ended up with a Grizzly G0619 Bench-top mill (Seig SX3) and a 1936 South-Bend 9″ lathe with a 3 1/2 foot bed (23″ between centers). Although I would love slightly larger machines I can do a lot with what I have. The biggest limitations I have run into has been “Z” height on the mill and Spindle bore on the lathe. Otherwise I actually prefer them to larger industrial machines for the scale parts I usually deal with.
On the smaller 7x lathes the biggest limitation I see is the bed length or distance between centers. It is real easy to run out of space with a large drill chuck and bit a long with a piece of large stock that cannot fit in the chuck/spindle bore. An older local fellow I know has a craftsman branded Atlas 6×18 and extra length definitely helps even on a small machine. If I was considering one of these lathes I would not want anything less that a 7×14 and probably lean more towards one of the 7×16 variant that Little Machine Shop offers (Probably the base version).
TLDR: Any lathe is better than no lathe. If a 7x lathe will work for you, pick your price point versus quality trade-off and dive in.
Jeff
I have not bought tools, but I did get a dual beer keg tap kit and an ice machine for my bar. Ice machine has been great. One of the pressure regulators on the tap was bad and customer service said they would send a replacement. They sen me another ice machine by mistake. I bought another regulator on amazon and kept the second ice machine!!
Kyle
For better or worse VEVOR is just an import label slapped on products from many different actual manufacturers. Same stuff you would get from the alphabet soup brands on Amazon or eBay. Expect cheap components and sloppy finishes. Sometimes those are things I can live with for a bargain. My brother has one of their diesel heaters and has been happy with it. He bought some storage stuff and a few tools too.
Many of their products are clones of name brands. An example would be their drain cleaning equipment. You can get knockoffs of Ridgid or General equipment for 20% of the name brands. Some of these designs have been sold almost unchanged for 50 years. So long as no parents are infringed I can’t hold it against VEVOR for ripping off the designs. Reputable American companies do the same thing. Here is my beef with VEVOR: they keep stealing marketing materials from other companies. I used to get regular YouTube ads for VEVOR drain equipment showing General employees, demonstrating General equipment with General logos all over everything. This is both theft from these manufacturers and dishonest advertising to customers. The snake VEVOR is selling for a few hundred is not the same thing as professional equipment General sells for a few thousand, even though they may look similar. I copied some links to the videos and passed them along to the manufacturers. A rep from General told me they had already sued them and won once before and would now do it again. I stopped seeing the ads ripping off General not too long after that, but a month or two later I started seeing ads with footage taken from Ridgid. Not quite as obvious, but you could tell. I passed it along to a rep.
There’s room in my toolbox for spendy brands and cheap stuff alike. What I have no place for is dishonesty. Even if the products are okay for the price, I would rather get them through another source than VEVOR.
Kurt
If I was in the market for this type of tool, I would take a hard look at Precision Mathews.
Stuart
PM doesn’t have smaller sized machine tools; their smallest lathe starts at 10×22 and costs several thousand dollars vs less than $1000.
But yes. I skipped smaller Seig-made lathes and am still hoping to budget the funds and space for a Precision Matthews.
fred
I bought some Vevor branded machinery skates that I could trace back to the Shanghai Sishun e-Commerce Co., Ltd. – but could not identify the OEM. They spilled ball bearings out (from their swivel plates) on first use. I guess that I was hoping for too much for $40 each. They supposedly had a 6 ton rating but 4 placed under a 1800 lb. load could not do the job.
RCWARD
I am pretty sure you know the answer to that question.
Travis
My neighbor is a believer and bought a couple different items. The drills are junk and the lathe actually arrived missing parts. He had a terrible time getting it replaced. That was enough to warn me off.
Pisek
I’ve used their 10 ton hydraulic ram to straighten a frame out. It came in a metal case that is slightly thinner than the metal cases I’ve got from Greenlee, the tool itself has worked great and has been holding pressure for over 2 weeks while I have been busy on other projects. Being half the price of a name brand I’m happy with it.
kent_skinner
They suddenly appeared on my radar. Seem to be one of many Chinese clone brands. I’m not sure if they are the manufacturer or just another reseller putting some money into marketing.
That said, I need a Johnson bar to make moving my milling machine (about 2,000 lbs) and a few lathes easier. I’ve looked for ages to find a used on, but they never show up here. New ones are hundreds o dollars. I bought a Vevor (and had my choice of many indentical looking using from other brands) for $60. Yeah, it’s a gamble. As a hobbyist it’s hard to justify a $400 J bar when I can manage to get the job done otherwise. If the Vevor works and makes moves safer, it’s money well spent.
RickP
I agree with prior comments that Vevor is a step above the random Amazon brands. You shouldn’t expect too much — decent quality, but you get what you pay for. My experience with their customer service was very good.
I bought some Vevor pallet forks for a compact tractor bucket. They are actually really good quality for the price, but Vevor’s packaging leaves a lot of room for improvement. Their shipping box disintegrated in transit (and was taped back together by FedEx). All the parts arrived, but there was some some very minor damage. Vevor’s customer service promptly offered a 30% credit, which was more than fair, and I was able to repair the damage in an hour.
Pot head
I have a vevor pottery wheel. No one else makes them in that price range. It’s usable, but only barely. Would not buy again. There’s no way a beginner could learn on it. From that experience I would not buy anything that needed precision. I’d maybe get a wood lathe, but definitely not a metal lathe for example. Expect to get far less power out of it than advertised. They cut every corner, even making it not ergonomical.
Stuart T.
Only experience has been with a diesel heater (Wabasto/Espar knockoff) which I got through Amazon.ca, which I use for warming painted parts in the winter etc. I had some questions about interpreting the display. Contacted Vevor, and like another commenter above, their CS was worse than useless (likewise the “manual”, which was ghastly.) Fortunately the vendor turned out to be helpful.
You get what you pay for. In this case, I had to do some modifications to make it useful but it has worked well.
BTW, if anyone is considering one of these, watch the You Tube video “My First Chinese Diesel Heater”, by “Tom the Dilettante”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faz8RtV9t68). This guy is the gold standard for how a YT video should e done.
Mopar
I have no experience with them as far as tools, but as you said, they are VERY broadly based. I do have friends who have purchased some of their tractor attachments, and others who purchased some maple syrup making equipment. The consensus from both groups was they were junk. Besides the crappy welds and overall poor quality, it appears they don’t really have any understanding of what they are making/copying. Examples”
Tractor attachments where hitch pins were the wrong size for the size attachment, or spaced wrong. “Features” that were unusable because other “features” they added interfered.
Divided maple sap pans were the dividers did not go fully to the bottom of the pan, making the dividers useless. Pan welds that leaked. Non-standard fittings welded into the pan, etc. Like I said, it appears like they make stuff with no actual understanding of what they are making or how it’s used.
Brian
I bought a motor for my table saw from them. It stopped working after two weeks. After about three weeks of calling I eventually got a refund. I had to pay the $75 shipping charge to ship it back to them. Will never buy anything with that name on it ever again in my life.
Orneryknight
I’ve got several things from Vevor
A laser for cutting stuff works pretty well for the price I paid (think it was vevor branded but not too sure…~ 85%)
A spindle for CNC machining is working exactly as advertised – 700Watts of power input and the RPM is within 1% of what it said on the controller module (might be an irregularity in a potentiometer or so)
Ultrasonic cleaners and transducers do their things within expected parameters
An electrical motor I bought had a slight crack in an uncritical part of its housing, and they sent me a new one that does its job
The gearing parts I ordered for it look a bit flimsy, but we’ll within the range of what you’d expect for that price
All in all there’s still a few things where I’d advise caution for maybe not going too cheap, but personally I dig it.
eddie sky
No had the offer to test/try/buy/own Vevor but a few of my subscribed channels on utube were sent products to “review” and keep. Most disclaimed this. And most felt that if it were priced so cheap, they wouldn’t own them. Check out Mr Pete’s channel on machining. He had a mag drill and some side cutter bits (forgot their technical name) from Vevor. Surprised me that Mr Pete would use Chinesium products since he’s all USA made.
I get that maybe, just maybe, there is a Chinese company that knows its under the PRC eyes, but also wants to make a product that it can be proud of not be an IP ripoff or poorly manufacturered, and can compete with Japanese/German engineering. I’ve seen one item, made by Harvey, that caught my eye, a bandsaw. And it puts Rikon and Laguna to task, let alone Grizzly and Jet. Unless I come across a 14″ vintage Porter (US) from someone’s estate… I think the next shop tool will be from Harvey.
Anyone else notice the tool influencers on utube, more and more. And that “makers” and woodworkers ALL have Sawstops? Seriously…
Stuart
They’ve emailed me 20 times so far.
Jaycob P.
I have a few items from them and haven’t had any issues. Haven’t tried any power equipment though.
1) Anvil: no problems and was finished correctly.
2) Clamp on tractor forks: The like to loosen up on the bucket, but they were the absolute cheapest so I’m not disappointed. They do what I want them to do and have held up under some significant loads.
3) Weight box for my tractor: No issues at all. Welds were fine and the pins fit correctly. Worst issue was the door for emptying it was a different shade of red from the box itself, but again it as the cheapest I could find.
Barry+Abbott
We’ve had atrocious luck with Vevor equipment at work. Owner tried cheaping out and it bit us. 3 of 5 ice makers have had issues, one arrived dead with a short welding wires to the steel paneling. Both of the table carts arrived with broken welds and the powder coat on the frame of the cart flakes off if you look at it wrong, let alone tighten the frame to the point where it doesn’t wiggle.
Their customer service model seems to be very much “make it difficult and maybe they’ll give up”
Gianna
Hi team,
Hope my emails finds you well.
This is Gianna from Vevor Affiliate program.
May I know do you have interest to review our Vevor products? We can provide you free products, high commission, exclusive codes, SEM right etc.
https://www.vevor.com
If you have any requirements, please let me know.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks & best regards,
Gianna
Stuart
This is the 12th invite we’ve received from Vevor since this post was published, and 32nd in the past year and a half.