Quote Originally Posted by Nick79 View Post
Wow, this explains why I sometimes break taps. Of course it might help if I purchased BETTER taps to begin with. I watched the entire post and learned quite a bit - Thank you.
I've not broken one lately, but I also haven't done much tapping, lately, either. I've got a couple of little projects where I'm going to be doing tapping in very small sizes in the near future, I hope. Thought it would be a good thing to share for that very reason. I've mostly been buying Vermont-American taps and dies, since that what my local wholesale tool supply was carrying, but they're moving to Bosch. What I did was buy cheap Chinese tap & die sets some years ago, and as I've used them (and mostly found them about useless), I've been buying V-A taps and dies to replace the original not-so-good taps and dies. I figured $5 for a tap and die case wasn't a bad price. A couple of the taps have actually been usable. Most needed a bit of honing to work. Not sure why they left flashing/burrs on the taps, for example. But the cases are decent.

Bill