Tap wrench for mill/drills

[ZINOM]

This may be an old idea, but I've never seen it so I thought I'd pass it along.

One of the big draw backs to mill drill use is the inability to raise and lower the head without throwing the alignment out of whack.
I don't like keeping the head too high and bringing the spindle out too much just to drill, then tap a hole so I made a short tap wrench (crude, I know) that uses a tapered dowel pin and a spring shoved up the drill chuck.

Then I realized I could simplify the whole thing and keep the head where I normally would have it to do the drilling using short bits.

I ground a small flat on the tap shanks in both cases for the screw to tighten on.....the first wrench is pretty similar to normal wrenches and the second one uses a brass cylinder that gets held by the drill chuck and acts as a guide for the tap shank.

I use 6-32 and 8-32 most of the time so having a couple of dedicated set-ups isn't too impractical for me.

The brass cylinder used with the simpler of the two, could be changed to a short length of stock drilled in one end and dimpled in the other for use with a standard tap guide as taps of this size don't seem to have the dimple needed for their use.

Like I said before, it may not be new, but I hadn't seen it on anyone's hsm site or anywhere else so......

Thanks for all the help in the past!

John

http://www.mpiretattoo.com/tapwrench.htm

[This message has been edited by ZINOM (edited 01-26-2004).]

[pgmrdan]

Now those are clever! I like them.

Thanks for posting the pics.

[Evan]

Good idea. May I suggest you resize those images to a lower pixel count. You hosting service isn't going to like the traffic they will generate at over one megabyte each.

[ZINOM]

Thanks guys.

Evan, should I actually be concerned with how they feel about that....I pay the bill right?......I really don't know about that stuff and haven't heard about it before.

John

[Evan]

John,

You should be concerned, for several reasons. First, any hosting service keeps traffic logs for precisely this reason, to identify heavy bandwidth users. They all have bandwidth limits and will charge you more if you exceed them.

Second, nobody on a dialup connection is going to be very impressed at having to download a single photo that is over a megabyte, it takes too long. The pictures are being displayed at 445X332 pixels. This is the size the actual picture should be sized at. In actual fact the picture is 2048X1536 pixels. Currently the first picture is 1,116KB in file size. If I resize it to the display dimensions of 445X332 the file size become only 13KB, almost a hundred times smaller with no loss in quality and very quick loading time.

[pgmrdan]

John,

If you do something they don't like I'm sure they'll let you know.

[Evan]

As a matter of fact I just sent an email to one of my clients on Friday for exactly this reason. I am charging him $25 a month to host his website. I was reviewing my server logs and his site stood out like a sore thumb. Upon checking it turns out that he has many pics over 500K and a number over 1MB. He is using 137 megs of server drive space which at going rates should cost between $100 to $250 per month.

[ZINOM]

Thanks Evan, I'll check into resizing and see what I can do about it....I'm not the tech one in the family.

I didn't know about charging more for increased traffic....I just have my wife throw the pictures up on my site and link away.

John

[Evan]

Putting pics on here ensures pretty heavy traffic. There are a lot of people on this board including the lurkers (not intended as a slur). I am very careful about my file sizes for the pics I post as it is responsible for a lot of traffic and at all times of day.

BTW, since I started posting here last year the photos on my server that are displayed in my posts have been downloaded about 70,000 times.

[This message has been edited by Evan (edited 01-26-2004).]

[Herb Helbig]

Thanks, Evan, for worrying about us dial up folks! ZINOM, I'd like to see your pix, but can't afford to download MBYTES.

I've struggled with the mill/drill up/down problem, too, and settled on using a little laser mounted on the head and aimed at the wall 30 feet away for repositioning. That's plenty good enough for tapping.

Another thing I've done is to make wrenches out of flat stock with a notch filed or milled to fit the square end of the tap. In that way the point on the back of the tap is still clear to engage a dimple in a guiding cylinder in the drill chuck.

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[G.A. Ewen]

Zinom, Great idea, thanks for sharing it.

[ZINOM]

"Now with user friendly photos" (I hope hehe)

Thanks Evan!

John

p.s. I'm lovin' the smaller one.....it'll probably buy me some time in my need for a knee mill.

[Evan]

Yep, now you have the idea on the pics, just right.