Broken tap..help?

[AaronG]

Walton tap extractor took me 10 minutes to remove when I did the same thing. I was able to find one for sale locally, but I'm sure you can find online.

Aaron

Sure you are drilling hole to correct size before using tap? That must be one cheap tap to break in aluminum.
I agree with previous poster, go with #8 screws.

[RV7Guy]

Hey Simon,

Looks like you should have room to grip and turn from behind. Mini Vice grips!!!

3 pages of people who have broken taps!!! We need a webinar

[Charles in SC]

When I attached these parts I drilled through the longeron and put a nut on the inside.

[OLDSAM]

For future reference, maybe some help. For me and my RV-7A build, #6-32 screws do not exist. Nothing smaller than #8-32 will be used, since not only are the #6 taps easier to break, so are the screws easier to shear. If the platenut is just a little tight, they can shear off before they even screw all the way in, and are a pain to get out. If you run a tap through the platenut, as some do, then it doesn't stay tight as reliably. No #6 for me.

[rzbill]

Originally Posted by rmartingt

I haven't gotten to that part yet... why is a tapped hole called out? A nutplate would be much easier and less susceptible to complications...

++1. A nutplate is a heck of a lot easier to fix than an buggered up tapped hole in your longeron (not from tapping but from cross threading). That tapped hole has no thread locking feature. I figure a nutplate is lighter than the spare screws I would have to carry!

[OLDSAM]

As a fire protection engineer, I would consider corrosion spotting to be the least of my concerns if dealing with electric sparking (arcing) in a cloud of aluminum dust. Aluminum dust in the right (wrong?) particle size and concentration in air is highly explosive if confined, and if not confined can still produce a pretty hot flash.

[Neal@F14]

Originally Posted by OLDSAM

As a fire protection engineer, I would consider corrosion spotting to be the least of my concerns if dealing with electric sparking (arcing) in a cloud of aluminum dust. Aluminum dust in the right (wrong?) particle size and concentration in air is highly explosive if confined, and if not confined can still produce a pretty hot flash.

There's no dust produced into the air with EDM electric arc ablation. The work area is flooded with a stream of water to keep it all cooled so all the dust gets suspended into the water. Really messy and would be next to impossible to clean out all the contaminates from inside the tail end of a completed RV-10. It would be really bad news to end up with the steel dust, after the water dries away, imbedded into every nook and cranny and seam in the aluminum wherever the water carried it.