So I set up my account with J&L to get this special 8.04mm reamer for making bronze valve guides with on the lathe and placed an order for that and a bunch of other stuff. Yesterday I'm making a tool out of mild steel and break my 10mm tap. No big surprise there. It was part of a nasty cheap foreign carbon steel set that was just about ok for cleaning out existing threads but would barely cut a new thread in aluminium never mind steel. I bought it donkeys years ago when I was a kid and have long since replaced the common sizes I use with decent quality taps because the carbon ones are useless.
I was only a few threads in and it was already hellishly hard to turn and then the shank snapped like a carrot. So I wound the remains out with a pair of mole grips and today I went down to Sert Tools in Farnham near Slough to see what they had knocking about in their boxes of second hand stuff.
Mainly it's imperial sizes, BA and BSW in particular, from cleared out deceased old model makers workshops but you find the odd metric tool if you spend long enough rooting about. I found a mint condition L.A.L 1st 10mm tap, a broken 10mm one which I can probably grind down to make a bottoming tap from, a mint condition Galtona 2nd 8mm to add to my 1st and bottoming ones, a nice 6mm 1st and a brand new 5mm 1st still with the plastic dip coating on (I already have both sizes but couldn't turn them down), a mint
1/8th BSP which I have one of but they are like £20 new so a spare is handy, a 5/16" BSW to fill a hole in my collection (which I'll never use but what the hell) and a mint 12mm x 1.75mm Dormer 2nd to replace the useless one from my crappy carbon steel set. That now covers me for quality metric coarse taps up to 12mm barring the 9mm and 11m ones used in Peugeots. I also found a tap marked 6mm x 1mm but which miked up at 7.29mm o/d. As I surmised it turns out to be a helicoil tap because when I got home it measured up exactly the same as my existing one. Either a handy spare or something to stick on Ebay.Then into the various boxes of several hundred reamers and bugger me, sat on the top of a bunch of imperial ones is a special marked 0.3165". Well that's a number that rang a bell straight away because it's 8.04mm. It's also a taper lead in hand reamer which is a nice addition to the chucking reamer I got from J&L because I can use it for hand reaming existing valve guides out with which the chucking reamer wouldn't be too good at. In fact it was a hand reamer I really wanted anyway but they were £20 and the chucking ones were £10. The chances of finding a reamer that size if you needed one in a hurry would be nil and now I have two. Ain't life strange.
I've already got two 8mm reamers but I snapped up another one of the several I found in the boxes because they are all made to slightly varying tolerances and you can grab a few tenths here and there by knowing which reamer cuts big and which cut small.
So how much did this embarrassment of riches (8 good taps, 1 broken one and
2 reamers) set me back?Six quid. Taps are 50p and reamers a pound. I didn't get charged for the broken tap.
They also have hundreds of micrometers in varying condition, most of which have been sat there in the same place for the 10 years I've been going in there and they'll take an offer on.
If you need to fill some holes in your workshop equipment it might pay to take a trip over there one day. No point phoning them though because they have no idea what's in the boxes. You have to tip them out and root through yourself.
-- Dave Baker - Puma Race Engines