JEFF B. - Yes, "I saw the light", that's why I've got two NF GD's, a 47 and a 44 yr old one in the shop right now. I will admit I have a WF Hydro too but the old GD's pull all the heavy draft loads. Thousands of Thousands of garden tractor pullers can't all be wrong.
The WF center frame cover makes Hydro repair & service easy, but you never have to work on GD's, plus most GD's don't mark their territory like most Hydro's do.
On the taps & dies discussion, my metric set is Craftsman, and have never broke anything. My SAE set is mostly Irwin replacement pieces now and it's had a hard hard life. Stuff like 1/4", 5/16", & 3/8" taps I buy 2-3 at a time. They get dull, don't cut good threads then break.
Interesting story about taps, company I used to work for I ordered 300-400 steel bars to be machined for scrap shredder hammer pins. Bars were annealed alloy steel and got drilled & tapped with 2" 4-1/2 TPI threads in one end only. They drilled/tapped 150-200 bars then finally broke the tap and couldn't get the end of the broken tap out. Typical repair was to weld the hole closed with the tap still in and drill/tap the other end. So they reversed the bar and drilled and tried tapping the other end with a brand new tap. Broke the new tap off in the other end. We ended up cutting the bar off to make the next shorter size and welding the one hole up. Armed with 3 new taps they started tapping the now shorter problem bar and no problems the third time, plus ran the rest of the bars with that tap. Back 30 yrs ago those taps were $150 EACH, so that one bar was expensive for the shop in time, labor, and added tooling expense.
There's a reason most machine shops have a special machine called a Tap Remover, it's a plug EDM machine that burns the old broken tap out of parts without destroying the parts or damaging the threads. Last co. I worked at they machined a boat load of small diameter threads in varoius brass alloys and they had one. Certain brass alloys can be very hard to tap.
