One thing I would recommend to anyone buying one of these boxes is to thoroughly check for dents, dings, broken drawers etc before you bring it home. My first one was severely dented and I had to bring it back. Luckily they gave me $50 off for my troubles. The draws open and close smooth for the most part. The only thing is the box is not sturdy at all. It has a tendency to tip over. It almost completely fell over with only a few draws open and they aren't even fully loaded with tools. For the price is decent, but I think eventually I will pony up $1000-$1500 for a used snap/mac/matco box. yea you really got what you pay for when it comes to tool boxes especially used vs a new cheap box.
I agree with everything you posted there, right down to what you said about getting a used truck vendor box at the end. (My 1st choice is a Matco 4s).
One of the reasons that I didn't post up pics and a review when I got the cabinet home was that I found two defects and I wanted to see how HD handled that before doing a review. I also didn't want to post anything up until it was resolved because that wouldn't be fair to HD.
When I got the cabinet home, I pulled the big bottom drawer out and the drawer face broke away from the drawer side on the right. Either the spot welds weren't properly done, or they weren't done at all and the paint was the only thing holding the drawer face on. The small bottom drawer soon followed suit. So, two broken drawers, fresh out of the box.
I called customer service, got a ticket started. Everyone I dealt with was tremendously easy to deal with. I emailed pics to one lady, and she ordered two new drawers for me. There was where the real issues started, because the manufacturer sent only one drawer. It was dented. So she ordered another set for me. They came in wrapped in a box cut down to size to fit the drawer, no packing. So, more dents. She ordered two more drawers, one was bad, one was good. She ordered one more drawer. I finally got a set of properly packed drawers, in perfect shape. The cabinet is complete and happily holding almost all my tools.
Now I have a stack of drawers sitting here, two each of the large bottom and small bottom drawers. She told me to keep them and do whatever I wanted with them. I'd make a cabinet to hold them but I'm lost trying to figure out how to mount drawers. Plus, I'd have to figure out what slide channels to order and I wouldn't know where to start with that.
Any ideas?