My grandfather was a precision machinist / tool and die maker. I inherited all of his tools when he passed away.
Whenever I stripped the threads on one of my projects, I always had the proper tap to fix it, but it would take me forever to sort through everything to find the right size. Yesterday, I started to go through it all and get it organized into a single, larger tool box.
I found that I had every size that I needed, plus many, many duplicates. I decided to e-Bay some of it, but in the process of sorting and cataloging what I had (more than a thousand), I found a few handfuls that had broken teeth.
Back when I was an 18 year old gopher in a machine shop, I remember that I had to pick up all of the tiny, broken carbide cutters, as they were valuable and they were recycled separately from the other scrap.
I'm fairly sure that taps must be made of somewhat better than average quality steel, but are they worth separating out from regular scrap metal?
Incidentally, the newest of these are about 35 years old. Not only were they made in America, most appear to have been made within 100 miles of where my Grandfather worked!
