On Monday 02 April 2007, born4something wrote:
Hi Mark,
Nice concept but I'm pretty sure my tap was too brittle hard for
that. When it initially broke it left a stump protruding. It
crumbled like glass when I tried to grip it. It actually broke on a
forward cut, not a reverse chip-breaking action. That meant I still
needed to break the chips before it would back out. No way that was
going to happen by catching it on a reverse cutting exercise with
just one small point of contact.
Exactly what happened here.
I picked up a couple more of those today:
Not sure, but I suspect these are not really all that great, but such is
my ignorance of taps and Lowe's does have them locally.
I started on the second set of holes and the new one cut a lot better, I
suspect the old one was dull (about 15 holes in aluminum MAX?). WD40
may have helped rather than the cutting oil, not sure.
Embarrassed to admit, I used the mill to run the tap on through and
forgot I had lifted up the head and ran out of quill. Polished that
hole nicely to the OD of the tap :-/, Another lesson learned :).
Anyway, I decided to just tap another hole just above the one in the
original set with the broken tap. For the next one, I'll have all the
lessons of this mess :-).
Tested it out in the quill with the laser in it and it works just fine.
Can't get it aligned yet as I run out of adjustment - need to bore it
out more. These cheap laser pointers can be out quite a bit.
Using the screw for a power switch works well enough one just needs to
remove the button over the switch itself, which takes a little work,
buggered one of them in the process of doing that.
Going to head back in there and attempt to bore it out some more.
Hopefully I'll have enough room to get it where I can center it. I may
have to get that broken tap out somehow to do this. This prototype is
going to really be ugly :).
Fun, pix soon.
Take care, Vikki.
--
Victoria Welch, WV9K/7
"You can learn a lot from listening to people talk. Why everything I
know today I've learned from listening to myself talk about things that
I knew absolutely nothing about." - Gracie Allen
