There are lots of designs floating around for tap holders for lathes. This one uses an old drill chuck and looks easy to make. In addition to ensuring that a tap gets started straight, it can be used to drill holes with very small bits. By gripping the knurled body you can get a feel for how the drill bit is doing and control the torque so you don’t break it.
Model Engineers’ Utilities is a free, easy-to-use Windows program that has a very useful suite of calculators for machinists and engineers. There is too much to list here, but it includes one of the best cutting speed and feed calculator I’ve seen. It also includes thread cutting data, a spring designer, a unit converter, information for setting up tapers, a sine bar and gauge block calculator, sheet metal bending information and calculator, a gear cutting calculator, and much more. Both metric and English units are supported.
Toolmonger is having an interesting discussion about the quality of Harbor Freight’s inexpensive digital calipers. They aren’t too impressed but everyone else seems to be. [Editor's Note: They lost a lot of comments because of a hard drive failure.]
Here is a short pictorial about how this machinist/craftsman makes high quality artist pens and pencils out of stainless steel rods salvaged from a copier.
Recent Comments