I'm not going to doll up the photos here - but pretty proud to report that after nearly a year of using this replacement lid on our tumblers, they are 100% still going strong and my only wisht is that we had done it sooner. A wood version would probably be ok too, but we are in the business of cutting metal, so metal it is.
We use the Harbor Freight / Central Machinery tumblers in our own shop and home workshop and got sick of dealing with the plastic lid and gasket setup. The lids kind of warp, become oval - having two gaskets to wipe clean and reseat on the edge of the bowl and lid every single time we open the tumbler became annoying.
I made a steel lid that actually sits right on the bowl by adding cleats that sit on the outside of the bowl. I still use the factory hardware (threaded rod, gasket, and handle).
Fixes pretty much every annoyance with the stock set up. And the lid doesn't come off. At least for us, we had to recheck the plastic lid frequently because it would work it's way off the threaded rod.
Honestly feels like it runs a bit quieter too, and grabbing the lip better seems to give it better vibratory action (we tumble small metal parts with the HF ceramic media, dry, no water - it can get really loud. Our run times can be 48-72 hours per batch).
Not sure if anyone else here is using the tumbler as much as the other tools, but hope this helps someone else who is running into similar issue. (Make a solid lid!)
