Homemade Tumbler: A Report....Not Necessarily A Recommendation

When I made the switch to wet tumbling about 3 years ago I went the Harbor Freight route. It has, and continues, to work just fine. The small capacity kind of bugs me. But I have time on my hands and it has been able to keep up with my shooting volumes.

That being said, I have been interested in getting something a little more capable. But I didn't want to spend the money on either a Thumler's or a Frankford (nor wait for when it goes on sale). I'm not sure how, but I stumbled onto various YouTube videos where people show homemade contraptions they've made. Lots of "Home Depot Bucket", casters to enable the turning, in one case an old drill being the drive mechanism, etc. kinds of solutions.

I made the device shown below - mostly because I had the time to put into it and I simply just wanted to see if I could do it. I would say it's working "OK" - certainly well enough. My capacity has easily doubled - probably tripled. Plus, it's rotating fast enough where I can get a pretty good cleaning in roughly 2/3 the time it takes me in the Harbor Freight.

It probably cost me $50-60 in parts. Each metal rod is resting on ball bearings I found at Ace Hardware. The motor was the steal - $5 on Facebook Marketplace. I glued in a static end cap into one end of the PVC pipe and use one of those removable pressure test plugs on the other end. I cut out small arcs of pipe (probably 1" wide" and glued them inside the pipe to provide some agitation as the pipe rotates. The v-belt pulley and belt could be had cheaper off Amazon I'm sure. I bought the ones I'm using at Ace.

So while I can't say I'd *recommend* making this unless you find the process itself fun, it is a pretty simple way to get more capacity without much cost. And if you're mechanically inclined (which I am not....this thing doesn't run all that smoothly) there are some pretty cool solutions on YouTube. I'm probably going to get some angle iron and mount the bearings in that rather than have wood end pieces.

OR

Rev 1 of my contraption included internal paddles/agitators that were oriented as I'm holding it in the picture below. These are the "arcs" I referenced in my original post. I glued them in on edge.

I, like @Demi-human , felt the agitation was a bit aggressive. (Actually, I was concerned it was putting too much strain on the motor. With each revolution the rotation would slow and the motor seemed to strain a bit. I figured too much material was being held up.)

So for Rev 2 I ripped out those paddles and just glued them in as you can see in the same picture. My hope was to provide some-but-not-too-much resistance in order to get some agitation. This modification has worked well for my setup.