While my son and I were doing some clean up in my shop making a pile for the dump and a pile for Goodwill/Value Village. I pulled an OdJob mixer I had picked up at a garage sale a few years ago for a couple bucks that I had never used. Told my son to put it in the donate pile. A few minutes later he jokingly said "that mixer bucket would make tumbling brass faster since we would only need to do a single load per caliber". About 15 minutes later I ran across a box of conveyor rollers and a plan was born.
Shop cleanup stopped. After looking through some electric motors on the shelf we found a 62 rpm gear drive motor that seemed like the perfect power source. Using some bed frame angle and square tube. We tacked together a frame and even added wheels from the bed frame.
The first challenge the drum has molded paddles and those trough areas would not roll smoothly on the conveyor rollers.
Solution - weld up a ring from scrap sheet metal to provide a rolling surface.
Next challenge how to we get power from the drive motor to the drum? More digging through stuff on shelves. WE found a front wheel bearing assembly from one of the kids cars from the past. Decided it was just to big and hard to turn. About that time the wife walked in and said it was lunch time so work on the tumbler stopped. Over lunch my son was searching Ebay for spindles and found a mower deck spindle for $8.50 with free shipping. Problem for power transfer was solved.
The spindle arrived 4 days later and included a 5 1/2 pulley. I mounted the spindle to two pieces of angle and welded that to the frame. The blade side of the spindle had a triangular shape for engagement of a mower blade. I stopped by the local mower shop to see if they had any scrap blades I could have or purchase for cheap - no luck. So I decided to drill a hole and file the triangular shape in a piece of 1/8" plate.
I bent a couple L shapes out of 1/2 rebar and welded it to the plate and the other end would engage the troughs in the drum to provide drive power to rotate the drum.
The rest was straight forward mount the motor and buy a belt the proper length.
This was my first attempt which worked pretty well with 15lbs of stainless steel media and 15lbs of brass. When loaded with 50lbs of media and brass the little gear drive motor let me know I needed to rethink this design. Attachment 240669Attachment 240670
