I was just at a salvage type place today. They had an electric motor that would probably have had plenty of power. Everything else I've read here though seems to suggest I would need some welding prowess, which I don't have. Does the drill press solution assemble easily?

The drill press idea works great. No welding invoved.
If I could load some pics I would, but I'm having trouble doing that. For now I will try to explain the process. The bench top drill press comes with a stand and the motor drill assembly. I turned the motor drill assembly upside down with the shaft which holds the chuck face up. I did not use the chuck. The shaft holds the plate which the bowl will sit on. Since this plate needs a hole directly centered and that fits on the shaft, I used a solid pulley with the same diameter as the shaft. The stainless steel bowl then is bolted to the pulley. The pulley is used for convenience and is only used to hold the bowl.
Now the tough part. The whole motor asembly which now has the bowl mounted on to it should be placed on the stand. The stand consists of a steel pole and the base. It also has a work platform that connects to the pole. This work platform will support the motor assembly. The motor assembly can fit onto the pole but it won't go all the way down to the platform. A hole using a hole drill must be cut through the covering. This covering is thin metal and houses the two pulleys and the belt that turns the whole contraption. Once this hole is drilled the motor assembly can be lowered all the way down to the base. Then, the pole can be measured and cut flush with the motor assembly. The idea is to get the bowl posotioned perfectly centered on the pulley(plate). This is the best I can do right now. I already resurfaced one ball using those new sanding pads and it turned out great. When the balls weight block is not centered, and this will happen as you turn the ball over, I did get some wobble. I ended up bolting the machine to my work table with good results. The drill press cost me about $70.00 and the stainless steel bowl cost $12.00. I had all the bolts and drills and everything else. So for less than $100.00 I got myself a spinner that works very well. ASk me specifics. Maybe you guys have an idea better than this.

Thanks for the info, but it's hard to see without pics. Can you load them to someplace like http://www.flickr.com and then link them?

Again, thanks for putting this together!

I will try tonight. Can HTML be enabled. Maybe that is the problem.

You can use UBB Code. It's like HTML, but it's not . If you have a link to an image, you put [ img ] Link_to_pic [ /img ] around it, without the spaces within the tag.

you lost me on the tough part... making the work stand. try to get those pics up. can u still use the varialble speed on the drill press?

Explain the UBB again. You can still use a variable speed by changing the belt on the pulleys which are inside the cover. Pictures will explain everything.

i thought that was the way you would change the speed. were you able to upload the pics? i think i understand now about mounting it on the pole, but i still would like to see some images.

If you upload the photos to another site, you can link them here with the UBB code I explained. You can also click on the "Enter an Image" button to link to an image that's hosted somewhere else.

For the UBB code, you have the link to an image (like http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TM5SC72TL._AA280_.jpg ). You then put the "image" tags around it to make it appear like this



If you quote my message, you'll see exactly what it looks like.

HEY! You're pretty smart. That sounds lots easier than the stuff necessary to embed an image while posting and you could (presumably) edit in text around the images as well, no?