The Aussie Pinball Arcade
Aussie Pinball Forums => Technical Matters => Handy hints and tips => Topic started by: FirePower on September 17, 2010, 09:21:44 PM
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I've always fancied a tumbler but not been prepared to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for something I wouldn't use that often, so I set about making a cheapo version. Here are the results.
Used a 12 Volt car wiper motor. It has two speeds, fast is about 68 rpm and slow about 44rpm. It draws about 2.8 A on fast speed and about 1.5 A on slow speed, it's a direct drive connection to the tumbling body and I only use the slow speed. I didn't bother trying to calculate the torque as I figured a couple of wiper arms on a car was a "fair bit" and would most likely be sufficient. The body is a bit of old pvc plumbing pipe I grabbed from a building site. I was going to use plumbing fittings for the end caps, but at over $10 each they would have blown the budget, so used scrap wood instead. I used a few chair wheels to support the end on the pipe and the 12V power comes from an old atx pc power supply.
All up costs were $20 for the wiper motor, $3 for the wheels and the rest was scrounged.
I put the bits below through for the first run today and it worked pretty well. 3rd picture is bits before, 4th is after about 4 hours. I reckon it would work better if I'd done a bit more cleaning of bits with a wire brush before tumbling and maybe I overfilled it. But all up I'm pleased with the results.
It's a pain fishing the stuff out, but made a bit easier using an old magnet from a hard disk drive.
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Very interesting project there - it will be interesting to see if the results are as good as a commercial tumbler over the longer term.
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Thats wicked Firepower
Home made gear is great, especially when its cheap and it works
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Nice one firepower, simple and effective, I'm sure the results will be similar to a commercial one, certainly comes in at the right price. ^^^
Cheers
Dave
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That's the ticket.
You could scale it up and use an excess 5-gal bucket to tumble large parts I think. To fill with tumbling media might be costly, but then again maybe you might be like me and have a dozen walnut trees in the yard so you could crack your own if you really wanted to be cheap and tasty.
That's frugal thinking mate.
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Well done fire power.
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Excellent work there Dave . ^^^
Thanks for sharing the tip and hope it keeps working well for you.
With 2 more resto's (maybe 3 ) in my queue its high time I built one too !
Cheers
Dave
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What a top idea!! Very clever @@*
i might have to do something similar for myself *%*
Where do you buy the tumbling media from?
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^^^you got to much time on your hands $#$
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Nice one ^^^
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Where do you buy the tumbling media from?
Local gun shop, or ebay.
+1 bloody good simple aussie engineering!!!
Love it! ^^^
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Nice work Dave old wiper motors are great I have one running my camping spit.
I like the wheels to support the tub brillliant
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Where do you buy the tumbling media from?
I think Pet Shops carry the walnut media for bird cages, never tried to buy from them myself but I'm sure I have read about it.
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Where does one buy the media from?
I used Walnut shell, I tried quite a few pet shops, but none had any. Reading some reptile forums it seems there is a bit of controversy about it choking some type of pythons or something - I did not laugh too much *.* as I'm sure some would ridicule our interest in pins.
Gun shops had some media - which went under brand names, but seemed to be either corn cob or walnut shell, but it was REALLY expensive, about $20 for a box of similar size to a tub of butter - would have cost a fortune to fill my tumbler. I filled it about 2/3 to 3/4 full and added a few teaspoons of turtle wax car polish to the mix.
Ended up buying from these folk http://www.wellwood.com.au/walshell.htm
tut tut, not a sponsor of the site, but I mention it because I reckon the real value of this site is in sharing tips, tricks and info among enthusiasts. I ended up with a huge bag - more than I suspect I'll get through in a lifetime so if anyone wants some pm me and it's yours for the cost of postage and a beer for my troubles, which is $15 for an Aust post 3kg sachet.
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Thanks for the link Dave. (its going in my favorites)
which bag did you get? the one with the small pieces I assume.