Todays Project - What did you do today?

[Rickabilly]

There's no shame in breaking taps, I've broken more than I can remember, mostly M6 and M5s in laser or water cut 6mm stainless steel sheet work, I found when we would put a new guy on that said they had never broken a tap as their first reaction to seeing one of the other guys snapping one, it would often turn out that they hadn't really done that much tapping, we were sometimes doing 300 holes a day per man into these production parts that only cost a dollar or three each, so speed was the issue we'd order an extra ten pieces and "chipdriver" or "spiral fluted" taps by the dozen and just power through them with no mercy or regret. We soon went to power tapping. which didn't do much to reduce our tool life or increase productivity but didn't ruin everyone's hands for the next day, we would get such an "urgent order" bonus from that customer that when the job came up it was all hands on deck and we even had one of the girls from the office down in the shop having a go, the supervisors didn't have much supervising to do with twenty guys just tapping holes so they would be there tapping as well. I believe they were a clamping widget of some kind for a local mine and they needed thousands when they needed them but they never knew when that would be.
At the end of the job there were two prizes given one for the highest number of pieces completed and another for the most taps broken it was usually just lunch from the chip shop around the corner but it took away the stigma of snapping taps.

Rick