A guy just emailed me to comment on my "taptips" page,
http://www.spaco.org/taptips.htm

I said that I don't allow any (plain)carbon steel taps in my shop.
He commented that gunsmiths DO use carbon steel taps because they tend to
break a lot, but are easy to remove by smashing them.
I don't do any gunsmithing- the idea of drilling into someone's gun
barrel scares the dickens out of me. But here's my question:
Isn't maybe, the REASON the little taps break often that they ARE carbon
steel?

And just for information, how DO you tap a 2-56 or 4-40 or whatever hole in
a gun barrel? If you can only go 2 or 3 threads deep, you can't start with
a taper or even a plug tap, can you?

Are gun barrels hardened/hardened and tempered or are they just an annealed,
tough steel like 4140?

Pete Stanaitis
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