HuntingNet.com Forums - Meat Grinder Question

First you should grind your meat twice before you make it into sausage and such, second - you should forget about them cheap grinders for making big batches of ground meat.

Any grinder will grind deer meat. But I grind mine along with pork to make sausage and if you grind large amounts of pork fat - the grinder will get bound up and you will spend more time cleaning it than making sausage.

I bought a Porket grinder and took it to a friend of mine that has a small machine shop in his basement and had him modify it.

Again, my grinder was designed for crank handle use only and I did use it that way for a couple of years - with no help before I modified it.

You cut the taper off the end of the auger and install a steel bushing with a dimple machined into the radius to hold the grub screw.

You then machine the handle so it has a round hole - clear through and then drill the side of the handle so it will accept a grub screw. That is incase you wish to use the grinder with the crank handle.

You then go to a hardware store and buy the biggest pulley that you can install on the end of the auger. Mine is 12 inches. Install the pulley on the auger and tighten the grub screw.

You then go out and find an electric motor - the bigger the better.

I have a electric motor that is out of a Eletric Circut Recloser - it looks like a drill head. You machine the small pulley to the same size as the shaft on the end of the motor.

The pulley that goes on the electric motor should be as small as you can buy it - mine is 1 1/2 inches and the motor should turn as slow as it possibly can - mine turns at 60 rpms.

You want the grinder to turn as slow as possible because you want the meat to spend as much time as possible inside of the grinder.

You want a grinder with as large a throat as you can afford - this is one time that saving a couple of dollars now - will not save you anything in the long run.

Look at swap meets and flea markets for old butcher grinders and try to buy one with a 6 inch throat if you can find it. It will grind meat just as fast as any grocery store or butcher shop.

If you are careful and take your time, you can grind 60 lbs of meat in a single hour and it will last a lifetime.

Mine is already 16 years old and I only replaced the auger one time - because I over stuffed the grinder and put too much force on the crank and broke the end of the auger off and it is cast steel and couldn't be welded and machined and be as good as the origional metal.

Forget about all them advertisements for X amount of WATTS. Thats as stupid a thing as I ever heard. All that tells you is how much power the motor consumes. Not how many horsepower the motor has.

I like a 1 to 2 horsepower electric motor if I can get it and will use nothing smaller than a 1/2 horsepower motor - because anything smaller than that - doesn't have the torque needed to grind the meat when it is froze.

The more horsepower and the slower you can turn the auger the more meat it will grind and less effort will be needed to push it down into the grinder.

My grinder is TOO SMALL and it still grinds faster than I ever could using a hand crank.
http://www.amazon.com/Porkert-Grinder-Deluxe-Sausage-Maker/dp/B000EYVRKO