Hand tapping while watching football. After spending my recent hobby budget on trying to fix my existing printer, I’m back to working on the Herculien.
I recently discovered spiral point taps which can be used with a drill without having to back them out every half turn. Can tap a whole bunch of extrusions really quick. Totally worth the investment!
I’ve been sorely tempted to use a drill, but I’ve gotta admit I’m more than a little chicken. I have some SAE spiral taps, but I’ve only used them on thinner material with a hand drill. Even then, if you breathe wrong, they’re likely to get a few choice words out of you. Again, I’m jus too chicken😕
You’re right to be wary because taps are easy to break. You could use the spiral point tap but in a tapping handle. You keep the hand feel but save a lot of time by avoiding the reverse quarter turn for every turn / half turn.
Really, I feel like I’m far more likely to get a good thread by hand taping with a spiral point machine tap than hand tapping with a “hand” tap. Machine taps seem easier to start.
When I am tapping plastic (usually, threads in 3d printed objects) I exclusively use spiral taps. They throw a nice spiral chip out the flutes. I have broken an M3 spiral tap in 6061 aluminum, but only when it was at nearly full depth.
@William_Rilk Any updates on the progress? I am excited to see it before Google goes and kills off this community I love so much.
Yes, much progress. Still have to buy a few things. I am actually printing parts at this very moment!
I am really sad g+ is going away… right in the middle of my build. I hope we can find another forum or format to share.
@William_Rilk I am sad too. We now have a good archival backup with Gitlabs. But we need a new location for our discussions moving forward. I want it to have a similar low barrier to entry for those coming in, public view-ability even without membership… but a member to post, easy member management system, a good spam handling system and notification system for moderation. And good multimedia hooks for sharing both text and pictures. I will let you know if I find the perfect solution. Everything so far has only check partial boxes. I haven’t found the home-run solution yet.
I wish discourse had an importer that we could use for the output of the exporter, but it doesn’t look like it has anything similar. But that’s one of the reasons that I wrote the unmodified feed into the repository—so if something like that appears, we can move forward later.
@mcdanlj Never tried tapping printed parts, usually just force a machine screw in but it’s tiring.
Recently, tried printing holes with modeled thread, and found them work quite well down to M3 thread. The best part is it doesn’t increase print time much.
I just realized on re-reading that I misread. I have both spiral tip and spiral flute taps; in plastic I like spiral flute taps because they eject a long chip out the top and so work well even for blind taps; spiral tip aggressively push the chip out the bottom of the hole.
@hon_po I use to use a screw as a tap and hated every minute of it. I think a tapped hole has more secure, better-formed threads than printed threads, and tapping in plastic is fast and easy. So at least for holes where strength is important it seems like a good idea to me. But whatever works!
@mcdanlj for printed parts… designing for heat-set inserts is my favorite now (that or a nut pocket if space allows). No fear of stripping that way, and with a soldering iron the heat sets go really fast, and they are relatively cheap if purchased at volume.
Yes, I bought 100 brass M3 inserts a few years ago. But I found myself designing to tap the plastic more often because it worked, and I had a few times when I got the inserts mis-aligned.