How to Tap the Mounting Hole of an Oil Pump Pickup

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Doug, I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now Mark's going to tap the hole so that it'll take a bolt to hold the oil pump pickup in place. It's to long of a pickup to just hang out in space. Now the important thing with a tap is not to break that sucker off. The steel in the block is very soft, the tap is very hard, the block though is malleable it's very flexible steel. The tap is very brittle so even with this little tiny ratchet if you push at an angle, if you push to hard, you'll break it off. So you'll see he makes a couple turns there until it starts to get hard to turn and then he'll back it off. So now he's tightening down and that gets hard so he backs it off. There's better tools for doing this rather than a ratchet but none of them will fit in this close tolerance. So he's using some oil there to keep it lubricated and he's also got Wayne there with the air to keep the little shavings out of the motor. And now we have a tapped hole and no shavings in the block."