Craftsman was originally a Sears house brand that sold tools, and later added garden equipment to its line of products. As Sears fell on hard times the Craftsman brand was purchased by Stanley Black & Decker in 2017. What's left of Sears, now called Sears Holdings, has a limited license to the brand. And that's where this piece of crap comes into play.
I purchased this fine example of overseas engineering, the Craftsman Battery Powered Sprayer Wand, from Amazon on 29 March 20204 for the princely sum of US$36.55, which includes tax. I purchased it because I could no longer spend long periods applying weed killer from a mechanical, manual sprayer. Even though I'd switch from hand to hand, and only used any one hand for no more than 10 minutes, by the end of the day my hands pretty much hurt like hell. So I decided to buy one of these. I purchased it because it had the official Craftsman logo embossed on the side, and I'm old enough to still be drawn to Craftsman the brand. Silly me.
When it arrived it included batteries, which I immediately put into the wand and started to work. True enough I spent a number of days applying weed killer, enough so that the yard smelled like a big salad. When it was done I packed everything back on a shelf so that nothing would happen to it. Silly me.
Imagine my surprise when I took it all down today to do a bit more weed killer application. It wouldn't work. Batteries I thought. Florida weather is hell on batteries, so I put in a fresh set of AA batteries. Still wouldn't work. I wasn't particularly amused by these events, especially now that the rainy season is in full tilt here in Central Florida and the weeds are growing visibly day by day. I can pull and weed-wack to the cows come home (or the showers start) but I still need to apply that weed killer magic known as 20% vinegar. I didn't want to spend more money and I needed to do the work now, so that's when I started to take it apart to see what, if anything, was fixable.
As you will note above, the case is simply two halves of thin plastic snapped together. It took little effort to separate the halves and to see the interior "mechanism", which was nothing more than a simple switch, motor, plastic tubing to carry whatever you need to pump, and a place to house the AA batteries. Note that the outer part of the switch, the gray item, does two tasks: push down the switch for motor power, and push in a physical valve on the pump (the cyan part at the top of the motor) to allow fluid to flow. Why it was designed and built this way isn't too clear, but here we are.
When I put in the batteries and just pushed down the electric switch, I heard the motor thump. That meant the physical pump itself was physically blocked from turning.
I pulled the motor/pump assembly out of the handle and removed the top of the pump mechanism by removing three Philips head screws. Two of those screws also held the pump to the motor. Once the top was off you could immediately see trash within the pump. The pump uses a pair of gears as impellers to move the liquid, and they're covered with a black material. I thought at first the gasket was disintegrating due to the 20% vinegar being pumped through the mechanism, but after pulling out the gears and washing everything out, the gasket was still in excellent shape. I can only assume that there was trash in the bottle of liquid itself.
After cleaning the pump, reconstructing everything in reverse order and putting the original batteries back in, the pump worked as before and I got a bit of work in before the skies clouded over and the rain began to fall again.
I won't recommend this item to anyone, and even if I did, you couldn't purchase from Amazon anyway as it's now "currently unavailable" and Amazon doesn't know when it will be back in stock. In the mean time I'll keep it limping along until I can find and purchase something more rugged.
As for Craftsman, the brand has become so diluted by this kind of crap that I can't recommend Craftsman either. I still have the much older Craftsman tools I still use around the house, but those tools came from the 1960s and 1970s, first as gifts from my parents, and later as purchases when I was first starting out into the world. They're still in superb shape, which is a testament to the high quality Craftsman once had.
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