Those who joined me for my Gauge O Guild an Evening With Session will have heard me mention YouTuber Joe Pie as someone whom I have learned a lot of techniques and in the past I have made a couple of his shop project tools

Needing a distraction from my current endeavour which has been quite frustrating I decided to follow this video and make another small tap handle. I have previously made one similar to the one that he shows at the start of the video but I made the hole in it a bit big so it’s more suited to larger shanked taps.

As regular viewers of my posts will know I am a great believer in recycling and early this year I bought a job lot of vintage tools from eBay for the princely sum of £7.50 I really bought them for the 3MT-2MT sleeve that was included but there was also a very well made large tap wrench a Moore and wright imperial ruler, a set of sprung external calipers and a couple of 1″ die holders. Of the latter one was very well made and as I have a couple of 1″ dies will come in very useful. The second was a bit battered and had an aluminium casting for the die holder with a couple of 1/2″ steel bars as the handles. This I consigned to the useful bits box and so part of one of the handles became my material for making the miniature tap handle.

I popped the whole thing in the lathe and being very careful of the large lump in the middle I parted of approx 65mm (just over 2.5″) this allowed a little to tidy each end up bringing it back to a finished size of 62mm or a whisker under 2.5″ .

Then I followed Joe’s steps. I adjusted my hole dimensions to suit an M6 cap head screw so I drilled 5mm for the tapping size, 6.5mm clearance and then 10mm to recess the head of the screw. I drilled until the head was just proud of the end of the handle and then used a 10mm end mill to flatten the bottom of the hole and allow the screw to just sit inside the handle when fully screwed home.

I drilled a 4mm hole in the centre which will take up to a 4BA tap (It might take bigger but that’s the one that I measured as I mostly use smaller than that). Shown here with a 12 Ba tap inserted.

Lastly I heated it up and dropped it into some olive oil overnight to give it a nicely blued appearance – Although I had cleaned it with IPA I went back and did a small adjustment from which I didn’t clean the oil inside out again before the heating. Although I couldn’t see it, this must have created a bit of smoke, which set the workshop smoke alarm off. At least I know that it works.