Help me find a tap and die set

I'm looking for something above HF quality and below "I cut threads for a living" quality. I use T&D for restoring threads on existing hardware. I'm aware that there are specialty tools for doing that, but I've always done fine with regular T&D.

All I'd like in the set is M4-M10, in both coarse and fine.

GO!

McMaster can get you pretty good quality for price
tap and die sets

I recently bought this, mostly since a Sears was convenient, but also because it has just about every size you'd ever conceivably need. There are always coupons to be found too. I needed to repair the threads on the seatbelt mount bolts for my Miata - somewhat important for those to not be all boogered up. I've only used it a few times but it worked very well.

http://www.sears.com/craftsman-75-piece-combination-tap-die-carbon-steel/p-00952377000P?prdNo=1&blockNo=1&blockType=G1

McMaster normally has better prices then Northern and/or Fastenal. There's a chance that if you hunt around on Tractor Supply that they make have something that'll work on the cheap.

In the past have built my tap collection one at a time from a local industrial tooling supplier. A high quality M8 tap is under $10. Buying what I needed, when I needed it took the sting out of laying out the $250-300 I have into that tap drawer.

Last year I snagged an older Craftsman metric tap and die set at a swap meet for $15. All decent quality USA made stuff. It sounds like exactly what you need, but it looks like they don't offer it any more the new stuff looks like the higher end HF stuff.

$56 for all that you want and more

$32 shipped for another with fine and course

stafford1500 wrote: McMaster can get you pretty good quality for price tap and die sets

Hm. The smallest set McM-C has that has the tools I need is $150. The HF set is $19.99. Is there something in the middle?

The more expensive HF Metric set is actually quite good. Believe it runs $80.

The cheapest HF stuff is pretty.... garbage.

Coming from a machinist background I think I am a bit more "particular" about taps than an automotive guy who is mainly chasing threads. Just looking at that Klutch set gives me the willies.

When I see that marking for size and pitch I just know they are trouble

I paid real money a Walton tap remover set because of those things

captdownshift wrote: $32 shipped for another with fine and course

I went for this one. Amazon has a Father's day promotion if you spend more than $45 on TEKTON tools. I added a precision pliers set to my order. It winds up costing me $4 and gets me free shipping :)

I'd rather buy Emuge or Brubaker personally. Doesn't hurt I get them at vendor cost though.

Take a gander on www.ptsxpress.com for probably much better quality than you really need.

Find a set made in Poland. The craftsmanship will be way above chinese with reasonable prices.

These people have everything from bottom of the line to top of the line:

http://www.rex-supply.com/cgi/CGP2HOME

I buy from them when HF won't do. You can call them up and talk to someone that actually knows the products and tell them what you need.

EvanR wrote:

captdownshift wrote: $32 shipped for another with fine and course

I went for this one. Amazon has a Father's day promotion if you spend more than $45 on TEKTON tools. I added a precision pliers set to my order. It winds up costing me $4 and gets me free shipping :)

What's the promotion?

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: Find a set made in Poland. The craftsmanship will be way above chinese with reasonable prices.

I have found Polish stuff between German and Russian quality wise. Wait....

Swank Force One wrote:

EvanR wrote:

captdownshift wrote: $32 shipped for another with fine and course

I went for this one. Amazon has a Father's day promotion if you spend more than $45 on TEKTON tools. I added a precision pliers set to my order. It winds up costing me $4 and gets me free shipping :)

What's the promotion?

Spend $45, get $10 off.

I have Craftsman 39 pc sets for SAE and Metric. They cut nice threads in 6-4 titanium 15 years ago when I bought a frame where one mounting hole wasn't factory threaded. I fought with my $10 H-F set for 30 min. Those sets went straight into the trash.

But... this was 15 years ago when a lot of Craftsman tools were still Made in the USA and of fairly decent quality. I don't know about now.

EvanR wrote:

Swank Force One wrote:

EvanR wrote:

captdownshift wrote: $32 shipped for another with fine and course

I went for this one. Amazon has a Father's day promotion if you spend more than $45 on TEKTON tools. I added a precision pliers set to my order. It winds up costing me $4 and gets me free shipping :)

What's the promotion?

Spend $45, get $10 off.

Interesting i'll have to look around. Slowly outfitting my home garage with a bare minimum of tools, only have screwdrivers and pliers so far.

Thanks!

Cheap drills, taps and dies are way too expensive for me.

I made do with American made Hanson stuff for years. I finally good a lot of decent stuff with the contents of a shop I bought. Now for general purpose I buy the McMaster TiN coated regular stuff.

Important - if you're going to be tapping holes you make, you need a real drill index - #1-60, letters A-Z, fractions from 1/16" to 1/2" by 64ths. And unless you'll only ever tap through holes, taps come in sets of 3; taper for starting holes, plug to get close to bottom, and bottoming to thread to the bottom.

Get some Tap Magic or Relton Rapid Tap for aluminum and regular black sulphur cutting oil. If you need to do stainless, titanium, inconel or anything hard, Castrol Moly-Dee is worth it's weight in extracted broken taps.

In reply to motomoron:

I second getting good cutting/tap lubes. Makes the job SOOO much easier.

i am a machinist... sometimes i might accidentally drop a tap or drill that just happens to be needed for something that i have going on at home into my lunchbox...

Go buy the HF kit (60pc, on sale $35), as you wear them out (or need sizes not included), replace with good stuff from the local machine shop supply store and throw the old ones in a can labeled "free to modify". Same goes for drill bits if you don't have a good set already.

Swank Force One wrote: The more expensive HF Metric set is actually quite good. Believe it runs $80. The cheapest HF stuff is pretty.... garbage.

Perhaps. The cheap HF set (runs about $12) has served me fine for cleaning up existing threads on steel fasteners. It didn't like trying to do inconel studs, but I'm really not surprised by that. :)