Is there anything worse than breaking a tap?

The internet is rife with anxious machinists that are either iffy about their tapping techniques or they avoid tapping with any method beyond the familiar. Understandably so… taps aren’t always cheap and breaking one off in a hole will (at worst) ruin your part or (at best) waste hours of tedious work trying to get it out. While there is no easy answer to breaking a tap, knowing your options can help avoid breakage. So, here are four of the simplest ways to tap.

We have recently started offering a new auto-reversing tapping head, made exclusively for us by Procunier in Lakeland, Florida.  You'll find Procunier tapping heads used in machine shops around the world - they're a bit pricier than some of the other tapping head options we sell, but also really excel when using very small taps or when there is a need to tap a lot of holes at once (high duty cycles).