Unfortunately for me that must be a local thing since my HF still has them at $67.99. I would have bought one in a heartbeat for $29 even though I have two of their single drum tumblers already.
I'm still kicking around ways to improve the ones I have. I found out that the v belts I bought are just a little too short, but they do fit the pulley grooves satisfactorily and are make like an automotive v belt so I think they'd last forever. With that in mind I ordered a couple more, one set one inch longer and another set two inches longer. That should cover it. Those belts are less than $5 each so it's no big deal to have a few extras that don't fit right now - because I'm also working on my upgrading the motor project.
I kind of abandoned the idea of using a gear reduction motor to hook direct to the drum driveshaft because it seems the multitude of small gears needed to achieve enough reduction would be too fragile to drive the loaded drum. While I think the motor could handle it the gearbox would most likely break. Instead I'm now looking at using a pulley system but with much stronger belts and a better motor. I ordered a DC motor with a tested no load speed of 5400 rpm which would give me a drum rpm of about 64 rpm if I keep the same 8.4:1 motor pulley to driveshaft pulley ratio. That may be faster than I want so I also ordered a speed controller which should allow me to dial in a slower speed.
I believe I read that some of you are running your drums at 65 rpm now but I timed mine this morning and got pretty much what I calculated it would be - 40 rpm. Since I am happy with my results at that speed I'm going to aim for the same speed with the new setup.
On a completely different note I'd like to thank almar once again for telling us about that grain mill. I got mine mounted up but had to wait for a batch of pucks to dry before I could try it out.
Attachment 295748
As of this morning I was ready for a test run. Holy crap! This thing is slicker than pig snot! It used to take me a couple of frustrating minutes to break up one puck using a hammer and brass punch, then I'd run it through my coarse grinder, then through my fine grinder before it was ready to screen. With this mill a puck is well broken up in about 3 seconds and it's already fine enough to go straight to my fine grinder, thus eliminating a step. It didn't take much time at all to break, grind and screen one drum's worth of powder. Breaking the pucks was the only part of the entire process I found tedious and now it's no big deal. So thanks again almar, I probably would have never thought of that on my own.