On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 06:35:36 +0700, John B. Slocomb
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 13:47:46 -0400, Leon Fisk
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 10:07:19 -0700
"Bob La Londe" wrote:

snip
Forgot the tapping fluid,
and I could feel the stainless starting to gall as I tried to start the tap.
Rather than walk back out to the shop I hit the tap with a shot of olive l
cooking spray and it worked. Maybe not as impressively as Tap-Magic tapping
fluid but good enough to tap a couple holes in some stainless sheet.

If I recall correctly "lard" was commonly used. If you find that round
tuit here is an old Machinery's Reference Book on Cutting Lubricants:

https://archive.org/details/cuttinglubricant00newyrich

All sorts of old concoctions you can experiment with

I can certainly remember when "lard oil" still used as a cutting
lubricant.
I grew up using straight lard. We had the only pipe dies for twenty
miles at the time when we got electric power and people discovered
that they could have running water like the lucky family who had an
elevated storage tank supplied by a water ram in a nearby stream.