Originally Posted by
dabac
Well, yeah.
A relative of mine asked if I could put together a beater bike for him, so I pulled a frameset from the boneyard. It was missing one crank bolt.
"Can't let it go like that" I thought, and tried to insert one. Stopped rapidly, took too much force. Brought out one of my notched "cleaner" bolts. It too took a lot of force, and not much came out. But it flattened the thread profile on the "cleaner" bolt.
If it comes down to the same money, I'd rather buy a tap than another BB. Get this beater bike on its merry way.
The tap will snap since they are made of a hard brittle steel. Even if it doesn't the hardened spindle will quickly dull them. That's probably why your bolt would work better for these situations. Square taper BB spindles are pretty cheap and even the cartridge BBs are only 20$ and last a heck of a long time. Our local co-op has a tap and die set but they don't bother tapping spindles or cutting the threads on the ends of nutted ones.
I'd buy a couple of m5 x 0.8 maybe a bottoming one too.