Originally Posted by
caddisguy
I'm actually not sure about the HP of the grinder to be honest. I would have to do some digging in that regard. All I know is that it is a "mid grade" one from Cabela's we picked up on sale about 5 or 6 years ago.
So far it has been great. We have used it on 5 or 6 bears. Normally we just trim and clean up the meat, cut it into "ready for grinding chucks" and vacuum pack those until I realised ground meat actually fends of freezer burn for even longer, as it conforms to the bag so that it is even more air tight.
Anyway, we were almost finished grinding yesterday when I believe the blade became dull enough that it's having some trouble keeping up. It seemed to be less efficient and getting jammed up a little, so we had to freeze the last two bags in chunks. I'll order another blade and see if that fixes it... but not bad at all, it ground the most of at least 5 bears.
Sadly I don't think we really got as much meat as I thought. By the time we had done the trimming, removed the fat, etc, vacuumed it all up, I felt like there was only around 40lbs at the most, maybe even less (we don't have any kind of scale in our home because I don't want to know how fat I get LOL) I think the scale of meat on bears can drastically differ... seems like you can shoot a 250lb bear and get almost 50% that in meat, but you shoot a bear that is around 150 lbs and you might only end up with 40-50lbs. That was the second smallest bear I have taken and I observed the ratio difference with the other as well.
I kept some fat trimming from this one, for the first time ever to see what I can do with it. Going to have to look into rendering fat. I know nothing about it.
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