The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Tool Chest Tap Extractor!

I broke off a 1/4-20 tap in my engine while I was in the process of rebuilding it. I tried many different ways of removing the broken tap and all of my attempts up till now have not been succesful. My brother-in-law said he had heard about a so called "tap extractor," so I did an internet search and low and behold I found such a beast. The tool is made by Walton Company in West Hartford CT and it worked great! I bought the tool from the Toolsource.com for ~ $11. It has 3-4 fingers (depending on the tap you are extracting) and is sized for the tap you need to extract. The fingers are inserted into the flutes of the broken tap and then an integral collar is slid down to surface of the hole to support the fingers and then you use a tap wrench to work the tap free. Just a heads up in case you find yourself with a broken tap in the future.


Jim

Very handy!! Yep! Those taps have a way of breaking when you least want them to!

Then how do you extract a broken tap extractor? If they make it I can break it!

EDM or take a realy good punch and chip it out. The tap is real brittle and will come out in little chuncks. The EDM is a electric discharge machine that will burn the tap and what ever else is in the hole out and leave the threads intact.

You could always weld a nut on the end of it, of course you ca get the tap out that way too.

The tap extractor has three or four fingers, as described in the initial post, which slide down into the flutes of the broken tap. It is highly doubtful you could break the fingers off but if you did a magnet will suck them right out of the hole. They would most likely bend rather than break if your tap is in that tight. If it is that tight you have problems a tap extractor won't solve.

While I'm here, how about a tip or two to reduce the chance of a broken tap? If you are a trained machinist or mechanic you should already know this. But there are a lot of people on this site working their first mechanical project.

1. Use a tap lube. Tap-eze is a very good one for steel.

2. Use a tap handle. Don't try to get by with Vise-grips. The straighter you can hold the tap, the less chance for breakage.

3. If you are cutting new threads, back off the tap to break the chips after each revolution. After 4-5 revolutions, back the tap out and blow or wipe it off. Blow the chips out of the hole if you have air or use a Q-tip. Squirt some more Tap-eze in there.

4. If you are using it as a "thread brush" on old threads you won't have the build-up of chips but it's still important to use lube and to back off occasionally.

5. If you are cleaning up threads in an area where chips could cause harm, as in an engine block, pack the flutes with axle grease to catch the chips.

My metal shop instructor in high school always told us 1/2 turn in, then 1 turn back out. Repeat.

Over the years I have found that when I spent more money on good machinist taps, I had less problems with breaking because they cut so much better.