Sausage Stuffer for snack sticks

[merrell]

I have made a few "Tube Inserts" to stuff smaller casings....

Here's a view......

Great idea on the inserts Dave.....

[Beaver Camp Sausage Company]

Snack sticks are not that hard, they do take a little effort to squeeze them out but it is worth it. I say go for it and enjoy!

[DaveOmak]

Great idea on the inserts Dave.....

Thanks for the points Merrell... Some of us old farts sit and think too much.... especially when it comes to saving a buck or 2....

[butcher]

Academy has a LEM with metal gears for $148. might swing by tomorrow and see if they have any in stock.
Didn't really want to pay that much but the cheaper ones all appear to have nylon or plastic gears.
is it really that difficult to make snack sticks with the smaller casing vs sausage?

YES... think of it this way, you have meat in a larger canister with a 2" hole at the exit, that is now being compressed into a 3/8" hole... this creates lots of pressure. Many a people have "blown out" the gearing in their stuffers do to the amount of pressure needed to stuff meat into these smaller casings.
I blew the steel gears out of a $1000 omcan 30LB'er a couple years ago. Just a little FYI.. making snack stix is hard on the equipment, and hard on the shoulder unless you have a stuffer with very large gears in it (F. Dick or Tre-Spade) good luck

[butcher]

here is another variation of a modified / home made stuffing horn for snack sticks.. this is one I made a couple years ago now, and it is still working fine

http://www.smoked-meat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18369

[curious aardvark]

YES... think of it this way, you have meat in a larger canister with a 2" hole at the exit, that is now being compressed into a 3/8" hole... this creates lots of pressure. Many a people have "blown out" the gearing in their stuffers do to the amount of pressure needed to stuff meat into these smaller casings.
I blew the steel gears out of a $1000 omcan 30LB'er a couple years ago. Just a little FYI.. making snack stix is hard on the equipment, and hard on the shoulder unless you have a stuffer with very large gears in it (F. Dick or Tre-Spade) good luck

ah yes - but you were using a much larger machine with a seriously high hydraulic ratio (phrase i invented to make sense of this)

With a 5lb stuffer and metal gears - it's no problem at all :-)

Plus as a professional sausage maker - you're probably in more of a hurry than us amateurs. The day i start making regular batches of sausage over 100lbs - I'll probably start wingeing about snackstix as well :-)
Let's face it - when was the last time you made a small enough batch for a 5lb stuffer to be practical ?

Horses for courses

[Snarlingiron]

I'm with CA on this one. I have made snack sticks several times with my Northern Tool 5 lb stuffer with plastic gears. I ordered a 3/8" tube from LEM (if I remember correctly). I did add a bit more liquid to my mix to thin it out a bit. It wasn't a problem. Perhaps they took a bit longer to dry, but hey, this ain't a production thing for me. If it takes a bit longer it just does. Think of it like a pork butt. It takes the time it takes for it to get to temperature. I have had that take 12 hours and I have had it take 16 hours. So what? A few more hours drying time just means a few more hours I have to relax and have another Guiness or a nice whiskey. As far as the plastic gears are concerned, I'm gonna ride the pony until his legs fall off. When they break, I will order up a set of steel gears. Until then, party on Wayne! The plastic ones have held up for 3 years now.

[butcher]

agreed CA and Snarlingiron... but I do make smaller batches also, just look at me last sausage post... Mind you there were MANY small batches so I was in more of a hurry LOL

[44 bbq]

Probably gonna get the Weston 7lb stuffer for Christmas. For my first batch, if I wanted to make 1 or 2 lbs of sticks, could I simply measure out 1 teaspoon of instacure and convert to grams and use that amount for the amount of meat?
I know 1 teaspoon will cure 5 lbs so to do 1 lb would be less than 1/4 tsp. Assuming 1 teaspoon weighs 5 grams, that would be 1 gram for 1 lb of meat.
Would that be an accurate assumption?

[44 bbq]

Never mind. I found a post on the site. Somehow i missed it.

[erain]

It's piss easy. But you do need the smaller 5lb stuffer - with a larger stuffer the whole hydraulic ratio is going to be against you.

And so what if you have to reload every 5lb - 5lb of sausage stufffed into snackstix - makes a serious length of stix.

Again - Ignore all the pissing and moaning, I'll send you some true british grit and you can just go ahead and do it and then wonder what all the fuss was about :-)

Thanks Rx2

Just ordered the LEM 3/8" tube from Amazon and some Leggs snack stick mix.... See if the nylon gears stress any on stuffing, and will try to make sure the mix is watered down enough to get through that smaller tube..... If it seems like its too hard on the gears, i will probably stop stuffing the 19mm casings, switch to sheep casings (plugin me nose of course) finish the batch and get rid of the stuffer and order one with metal gears?.

Good thread with lots of insight

with all this talk of the 3/8" tube, I am curious what size casings are you using. 3/8" is equal to 9.53 mm. So you would need to be using some mighty small casings to need a tube that small. And like Ray said, all the stress on the stuffer trying to push thru the small tube.

And if you have a bigger stuffer, and from what i read the reasoning is that pushing 5 pounds of meat is easier on the stuffer is easier than pushing 15. I dont necessarily agree with that as pushing the meat down the stuffer can is not the issue. It is the reduction in size at the casing tube that is the real issue. And if you follow this train of thought then just put in 5 pounds at a time. I just made a bunch of sticks and other product in sheep casings, just took it slow, watched my moisture content, and had no probs with my 20 pounder. But if you try raming the meat through, you could have issues no matter what kind of stuffer you have.

Sticks are just plain hard on stuffers, use the biggest tube size your casing allows. I have seen even on the old enterprise stuffers metal scraped from the screw from pushing sticks.

I sometimes think about getting a smaller stuffer just to have a smaller unit but have not broken down yet. Just curious how many people have actually had the nylon gears fail. It is the steel on steel contact coupled with high pressure which causes the issues. Nylon if they would hold up seem like a better way to go. If I bought one I would leave the nylon gears in unless they failed. I dont recall ever seeing a post with pictures of broken nylon gears. Alot of talk about changing to metal but never really seen a failure.
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[AJ]

I started out with the older Cabelas 20# vertical stuffer and it was epoch failure for snack sticks. I used the caulking gun jerky blaster and it did work but was like a day at the gym, I was wore out when done. I took the advice of folks here and bought a 5# stuffer from Grizzly when they had Christmas sale last year. Their unit did come with nylon gears, but it was cheap enough. I placed an order to LEM for the stainless 3/8" tube for this stuffer and a set of metal gears. It is easy enough to change them out and they work great. I am still way cheaper than buying the metal geared unit.

I drilled screw holes in a big poly cutting board and countersunk for flat head screws. I just bolt the stuffer to the board, and clamp the board to the table/countertop. I had no problems making 18# of sticks this past weekend. The stuffer was easy to use and the meat mix only had 1.3 cups of water in 18# of meat, so it was not overly juicy.

[RowdyRay]

I started out with the older Cabelas 20# vertical stuffer and it was epoch failure for snack sticks. I used the caulking gun jerky blaster and it did work but was like a day at the gym, I was wore out when done. I took the advice of folks here and bought a 5# stuffer from Grizzly when they had Christmas sale last year. Their unit did come with nylon gears, but it was cheap enough. I placed an order to LEM for the stainless 3/8" tube for this stuffer and a set of metal gears. It is easy enough to change them out and they work great. I am still way cheaper than buying the metal geared unit.

I drilled screw holes in a big poly cutting board and countersunk for flat head screws. I just bolt the stuffer to the board, and clamp the board to the table/countertop. I had no problems making 18# of sticks this past weekend. The stuffer was easy to use and the meat mix only had 1.3 cups of water in 18# of meat, so it was not overly juicy.

That was my whole point. I'm a cheap SOB and used the info and feedback from others to invest properly. Love the unit I have now. Wasn't trying to discourage him, more like make him a well informed buyer.

http://www.smoked-meat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4814

[Fishawn]

I used the 3/8" LEM SS stuffer tube on my 5# Northern for snack sticks this past weekend withoot any problems, stress on gears, etc.... I could not find the size of the collagen casings on the packaging from a snack sticks mix from Cabela's.

That said, it worked great and was very happy with it.

Unfortunately, it was made in China something I did not look into when I ordered it ..... Looking back, other options, as posted here might have been a better choice

[MossyMO]

Use to do everything with our 25 lb. Sausage Maker brand stuffer and squeezing out sticks and links was quite a bit of work... the more volume in a stuffer and the smaller the stuffing tube naturally create more pressure on the mechanics of the stuffer. Year before last the gear case busted open (long story here - http://www.smoked-meat.com/forum/sho...hlight=stuffer ) and left us stranded so we promptly picked up a 5 lb. LEM stuffer to finish our sausage projects.

Cost of the replacement gear case on the 25 lb. Sausage Maker brand stuffer is out outrageous so I tried to repair it which did hold up for a while but eventually broke again.

This summer picked up a heck of a deal ( http://www.smoked-meat.com/forum/sho...hlight=stuffer ) on a Gander Mountain 15 lb. stuffer that is very impressive for the price and works well for us.

But overall in our opinion when it comes to meat sticks and links we will continue to use the 5 lb. LEM as cranking it is much easier do to less volume. As I always have said "Right tool, for the right job"...