List Defined Tap & Die Organizer by AKADAP

Last crawled date: 3 years, 4 months ago

This is a list defined Tap and Die Organizer.
I decided I could make something to hold my taps and dies that did not wast as much space as the blow moulded case they came in.
The OpenSCAD program uses a list to define the measurements of each tap and die. Comments describe the items in the list, and there are three examples.
It appears aside from the thread cutting part of the tap, no other part of the tap is standardized, and they will vary between manufacturers. Even within a single manufacturer, the dimensions do not follow any pattern. Measure your own taps and dies and edit the list. Don't assume that my taps are the same as yours or you will be spending 14 hours printing a chunk of plastic to recycle.
I normalized each shaft diameter to the largest shaft of the taps of that screw size I had. This made some taps a bit loose in their holes, but I hope it means that if I break a tap that I will be able to replace it without re-printing the organizer. I also grouped taps into similar sizes, and set their shaft length to the shortest in the group so that there would not be a ragged distribution of heights in the tap organizer.
I used a Brother P-Touch to label the screw sizes and tap types. It would have been nice to emboss this into the plastic, but The text would have needed to be so small, one would have to use a smaller layer height to attempt to make it legible, or if the organizer was enlarged to make the text legible, it would have defeated my purpose in making this in the first place.
Update: I included a position in the Imperial tray for a 20-18 screw size. It appears that I should not have. While I have a plug tap in that size (made by Bay State Tap & Die), numbered screws above 12 were removed from the standard set of screw sizes in the 1900s. I had removed some other oddball taps I had that it is very unlikely that I will ever use, like the 1/4"-32 and the 1/4"-64, but it seems I missed this one. I will remove it if I ever have to re-print this tray.
Update: I have deleted all apps because this requires editing the OpenSCAD design file and editing the list to customize it for your specific tools.