No pic for this post. Just to dicument what I tested like night, before turning in.
I stripped the handheld contactless tachometer to see if any solder joint came loose. The tachometer decided to start working again after I put the board back to its case.
To start my test, a small piece of black stick was pasted onto the larger spindle pulley. With the trimpot turned to max, the readout showed a number above 10,000 rpm. As the display was jumping around quite a bit, I don't know how much above 10,000 rpm it really was running at. If you remember from my previous post on installing the pulley, I didn't adjust the preload of the spindle.
Maybe it's time for me to make a lithopane of my family with the higher speed spindle pulley installed.