My 12 point Craftsman sockets are still working after 43 years, but I’ve also bought Craftsman 6 point 3/8 deep sockets and 6 point 1/2 inch impact sockets for those times when I want the best contact. The HF impact sockets are heavy and clumsy, but they work, at least so far.
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I confirm that. I was loaning a HF impact set from a friend of mine to get some old nuts out and they were snug and worked as intended… although they have thick walls
About 90% of my sockets and wrenches are Craftsman. They were made of incredibly tough steel and fit the fasteners well for the price. Their only drawback was that they were a little harder on your hand for the wrenches than a Snap On or Proto or Mac. I also have some very old Husky, New Brittan, J H Williams and Barcalo wrenches that are good. The last two made in Buffalo. Every one of them made in the USA. I have found the steel in the Chinese Craftsman replacements that I got for broken or worn out tool to be quite inferior. I now carry a list of hand tools that I need to replace with me when I go to old car shows and shop the flea markets there for used American made tools. The usual price is 25 cents to two dollars, depending on size. Sometimes you find complete old sets at such a good price that you can’t not buy them.
My son in law has a furniture repair and refinishing shop in a commercial building and a large 2 car shop at home for hic cars and motorcycles. Sometimes in the winter it is more convenient for him tp do car or motorcycle repairs at the wood shop because it has mor room and he has to keep it heated anyway and he has a 60 gallon compressor at home and two of them at the wood shop.
He has assembled a complete second set of car tools for the wood shop including some steel cabinets for probably less than $200.
I personally will not pay Craftsman prices for Chinese mad tools. The JH Williams tool I have were from the plant, they sometimes put out tools that had been returned for cosmetic reasons for truck drivers that picked up shipments after the shipping dept was closed and you had to find and load your own freight. There was also a chocolate company and 3 breweries in Buffalo that used to give out freebies to truck drivers that were there to deliver or pick up.
The breweries limited you to 3 beers but they were all pretty close together on Buffalo’s East side and they took deliveries in the morning and shipped after lunch so you might be there twice a day. One company, that shall remain nameless to protect the drunk, had a driver who drove a straight truck and made all the small pick ups and deliveries on the East side When he returned to the terminal at the end of the day he used to leave his truck in the yard because he was no longer capable of backing it into the dock. Not EVERYTHING was better in the old days.
Yeah that’s why I went the cheap route I think even if I was doing it as a living still probably so good tools here and there but the most would be cheaper end
You know something there is a flea market someone told me that’s close I’m going to make a trip out there this summer
12-point sockets accommodate 4-sided bolts & nuts. My cheap 12-point sockets have worked except when I needed to drain my gear oil: it was so tight (hadn’t budged in years) and shallow the 12-point shined the vertices without moving the bolt. I bought a 6-point impact socket (for more than my entire set of sockets) and replaced that bolt with one with a taller head.
I haven’t shopped HF for sockets (but have a lot of other stuff from them) but maybe their impact sockets are 6-point.
I’m not a demanding user.
I hope their impact sockets are 6-pt. All the ones I’ve seen are.
Haven’t checked but you are probably right I been meaning to get some impact sockets
My understanding, the advantage of 12 point has to do w/ the orientation of the square that the ratchet fits into the socket(which defines the ratchet handle orientation) relative to the positions that the other end of the socket will fit on the head of the bolt. 12 points have twice as many ways to fit onto the bolt as 6 points. What that means in practice is that for a 6 point may, the ratchet handle may be completely obstructed where for a 12 point, it isn’t.
I assume they are, but I didn’t check, so I didn’t promise.
Yeah, but I just turn the socket to click the ratchet one or two clicks to reorient the socket. 
Good point. There’s ratchets with different pitches to the clicks too. The more expensive tend to have finer pitches. Sometimes a ratchet isn’t quite robust enough; for those a breaker bar is better.
I agree that in those situations a 12 point socket is a blessing. When I said earlier that I couldn’t imagine a real need for a 12 point, I’d forgotten about those situations.
I guess that bottom line is that if one is going to work on cars, both are needed… two sets of each, so when that socket pops out from your hand and rolls under the car to a secret hiding place that only it knows, you can finish the job and THEN track down the socket.
The reason I remembered, I had to put down my ratchet and use a breaker bar today.