Chris finished rigid tapping and checked it into the TRUNK. Then we tried it a few times on the mazak. The first thread came out terrible—but that turned out to be because the Z axis scaling was wrong. After that was corrected, the next thread came out fine. After that, we stepped up to doing it metal (aluminum), and that also gave a snug fit. The mazak spindle worked nicely for this, turning around from +300RPM to -300RPM in about one turn. Any reversible spindle with encoder and index pulse should be able to do rigid tapping.
(originally posted on the AXIS blog)
