Tapping with a hand held drill

[Jake M]

Just watched a YouTube video and guy was tapping hole in metal with a Dewalt drill and some kind of clutch chuck. What is this? Ok. I kinda found some info for mills and lathes. they use a spiral tap or something. Looks slick. I can see me breaking a bunch of these.

Probably it was just the normal chuck, but the drill was in some arbitrary number setting of screwdriver mode. It works. It's a skill, you don't just pick up and tap any hole in anything at any time. Some practice and some tears are inevitable, but lots of not so deep holes are easily done this way. You'll learn quick what you can pull off and what you can't. Spiral flute or spiral point taps are pretty beneficial, as hand taps need to be reversed pretty regularly, which isn't practical with the drill. Spiral point is my favorite for that, as they are typically WAY more stout than the spiral flute, size for size.

 

[mmcmdl]

This morning I arrived at work to find 4 Thomson linear bearings tapped for a pm job on a machine . Swear to god they were tapped on a 15 degree angle from a new mechanic . Where ya get 'em at ? My boss said to give them a tapping block , which I replied they wouldn't know how to use it .

 

[Julie]

I do it all the time. Use a tap guide block to make sure the tap is inline with the hole. Use cutting fluid. And most importantly use spiral point taps for through holes and spiral taps for blind holes.

Using hand taps is just asking to break a tap.

 

[woodchucker]

I have tapped hundreds of holes that way from 6-32 to 1/2-13. Larger than that, I use an impact wrench. It does require a steady hand, and not for the faint of heart.

same here. I have tapped many holes using my drill. If I can't clearly see what I am doing, I'll use a tapping block to make sure I'm straight.

 

[pontiac428]

I only break taps in new material projects that are nearly complete, so I will grab the drill for stuff like #10 up to 3/8" as a matter of general purpose. In fact, the first holes I made on my big mill were actually in the machine itself to mount DRO stuff. For that, I just used a hand drill. It's worth it to drill holes straight if you're going to drill them at all, so I really should make some drilling and tapping guides. If I can do it on a bench, I'll do it right, but non-critical, non-precision, "field" conditions, I can hold a drill pretty straight.\

I'll change my tune the minute I break a tap that I can't extract, but I've got a lifetime of tricks up my sleeve for that sort of thing.