We had a power cut for much of today but before it struck I managed to knock out these two. Lie many I suspect I have an eBay bought set of BA taps and dies that go from 0BA to 10BA ( I do have 12 and 14 BA too but I bought these individually). The taps and dies have been fine and I have used them for model making for over 10 years, only recently breaking one of the 8BA tap. Which has been the first casualty. The die holder is also reasonable albeit I do much of my threading in the lather these days and I have tail stock die holder which takes my BA taps. The tap wrench on the other hand is pretty much useless. It's a bar type with one handle threaded to tighten onto 90 degree slot to grip the tap head. The threads are so sloppy that the moment you try to exert any pressure to get the tap moving it slips. So for years with the smaller taps at least I have tended to use a pin vice to grip them, which works but again can occasionally slip. Recently I was watching a video on YouTube where a guy was using a small tap in a small round holder and he briefly described how to make them. I made two with different sized through holes for different thicknesses of tap shanks - 2.5mm and 3.5mm. The upper photo has a 14BA tap in it and the phot below has an 8BA tap. With the obligatory 5 pence piece to show how big they are. They are made from 16mm aluminium bar. I think the guy in the video used 1" but that's all I had in stock. I held it in a collet and milled (badly!) just about 20mm in length. Then I drilled a 2.5 mm hole in the centre. I parted them first both off part way at 8mm thick and then put a slight chamfer on each edge to take away any sharp edges. Then I popped the piece of rod with them in the collet into a square collet block and drilled a 3.2mm hole to tap M4 for the grub screw. I chose the size based on the grub screws I had that would best fit the diameter of the bar. In this case M4 x 6 I made an initial mistake in that I only drilled through to the centre hole and I should have gone some way beyond to allow the tap to tap right to the bottom of the hole. I ended up redrilling the hole once I had parted them off which was much more messing about - lesson learned for next time. Finally I popped them back in the lathe and parted the first one off. Then I opened out the hole in the second one to 3.5mm and parted that off. A bit of clean up and deburring and they were ready for tapping for the grub screws.
