You guys will appreciate this...
So I'm in our robotics lab getting the pieces together to be sent off to a machine shop for some lathe work when I spot something interesting. Low and behold, a CIM from 2002, with hardened gear pinion and matching reduction! We had a very compact gearbox that year, and simply pressed a shaft onto the gear cluster FIRST gave us. Luckily this gearbox was our broken spare, because the friction fit to the output shaft was slipping too much
So, my drill press now has a reduction on the CIM, taking it down to about 1100 RPM (Someone check that... I forget the exact reduction with that year's pinion, but I remember it being something like 1:5).