Also, short life on one of my cheaper ones was caused by me overloading it trying to speed things up. When I loaded it too heavy the motor got a lot hotter.
One way around this is realize that the motors are sized for a specific load. One way to "tune" the load to the motor is to turn the unit ON. As the unit vibrates, pour in either your tumbling media from a separate container
OR your brass. At some point the brass/media mixture will start to "churn".
Stop pouring when things are moving as they should.
After a couple of sessions like this you'll learn what the proper churn looks like.
• If you want to keep your tumbler full of media, then you'll be pouring in your brass. The churn will tell you when to stop adding brass.
• If you want to keep your media in a separate container, then you'll be starting with your brass dancing around in the tumbler while you add the media. Again, the churn will tell you when to stop adding media.
Not only will you get better/faster cleaning results (because the churn is optimized), but your motor will never be over-loaded.
Side Note: This is also the proper time of year to buy a 2 hour Christmas light timer (
Like This) which you can plug your tumbler into. This is a great thing to have as a "backup plan" in case you get called away suddenly.
Hope this helps.
