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Pro tip: a retired frame builder in Portland showed me why he taps bottom brackets by hand and it stuck with me
I was at his garage in Portland two weeks ago dropping off a steel frame for a repaint. He told me he taps every bottom bracket by hand before chasing threads with a tool, even on new frames, because he's seen too many alloy shells get chewed up by power tools going too fast. He said, 'The hand tells you when something's off before the tool ruins it.' I tried it on a customer's alloy frame last Thursday and caught a cross-thread I would've missed with the tap driver. How many of you still do it by hand versus using a drill or tap handle?
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terryallen8d ago
Kinda like how you learn to feel a bad thread the same way you learn to feel a bad vein, the tool just moves faster than your brain can keep up. Slowing down and letting your hands do the checking catches stuff that speed never will.
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