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Bob La Londe[_7_] Bob La Londe[_7_] is offline
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Default Drill Press Foot Switch

"Martin Eastburn" wrote in message
...
Mills have a nice optional unit for tapping - auto-reverse on a set of
gears in the unit itself. It goes into jaws (or holder...) and the tap
into it's jaws.

Made just for taping.

Martin


If you are talking about a tapping head, they work just fine in drill
presses too. I have two of them in small benchtop drill presses that I
pretty much never take out. One almost always has a 10-32 spiral point tap
in it, and the other a 1/4-20 spiral flute. They are HUGE time savers if
you have to tap a bunch of holes. Adjust the clutch on a new tap so it
doesn't quite slip tappping dry. Then always tap with a drop of Tap Magic
and throw the tap away the first time it slips.

Whoever first told me about them. Thank you. I am sure it was somebody in
this group. They have saved hundreds if not thousands of hours, and a fair
number of parts that I no longer have to worry about removing broken taps
from. LOL.

On mills another tool that is sometimes used is an extension-compression
head. It doesn't auto reverse like a tapping head, but it does allow the
tap to go in further or pull back a a little if the reversing operation
isn't perfectly syncronized.