Yes for portability.... but the eastwood set actually forms better flares than the mastercool one if one was to just use it on bench.... the eastwood one it's almost a no brainer to use. you can mess up a flare unless you are really challenged.
my Mastercool flaring set makes flawless flares. I don't know how something can form better than flawless.
I tend to form most of my brake lines on the benchtop. I'm one of those guys who is really good at taking off an old line, and precisely duplicating it by looking at it. For that type of work a benchtop flaring tool is actually more convenient, and I had planned on buying the Eastwood.
Then I realized that I was going to do a lot of other flaring, like fuel lines, AC lines and the like, which would require flares to be performed on the car. In that context, the Mastercool is the only real choice for high quality flares.
I have no doubt that the Eastwood kit makes good flares -- one of it's appealing features is it's automatic depth adjustment. That simplifies the only part of the flaring job that can be screwed up to result in imperfect flares. The Mastercool set does require someone to do this by hand, and if you're just no good at that sort of thing then imperfect flares could result. But if that happens that's your doing, it's not the tools fault. The Mastercool learning curve is not at all steep. I was making perfect flares the first time that I used it, even on the very soft NiCopp brake lines.
