While I was raiding the tools to be scrapped at work, I came across a box of left hand metric taps. I thought wow, this must be the most useless type of tap out there. (Ironically I later ended up needing to buy a left hand metric tap for another project). Since taps are made of hard steel, I took them to make some wood turning chisels from.
I originally planned to make an interchangeable handle to grip on the shank and grind the threaded ends for the cutting edges. I ended up doing the opposite by grinding the shank end and using the threads to screw into the handle.
The handle was made of 1/2" hexagonal aluminum. Hex stock is measured by the inscribed circle diameter, so it is 1/2" from flat to flat.
First, facing and chamfering the ends in the lathe.
Then center drilling.
Drilling the hole to 21/64" for the 10mm-1.5 tap.
Tapping the hole. By taking advantage of the fact the tap already has threads on it, it makes for easy interchangeability by just screwing each chisel into the handle when needed.
Here is one chisel ground with a square cutting edge for grooving.
...and another ground with a pointed tip. Since the tap's shanks are pretty small, it limits the size of the cutting edge, but at least this will get me started for wood turning.
Testing it out with the tool rest.
"Operation Woody"
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