Ring Bologna Casing/Stuffing issue

[NDKoze]

I recently made a ½ batch of the Excalibur Ring Bologna seasoning listed below:
Excalibur Ring Bologna Unit Seasoning

The Bologna tasted really good. But I have a question about how to toe the ends f the 40mm collagen casings together in a ring.

Whenever I gave seen ring bologna for sale in a meat market, the ends of the bologna are hog-ring linked together by the ends of the casings. I tried this with my bologna. But I had a hard time getting the ends of the casings twisted together tight enough to get the hog-ring around the ends of the casing without puncturing the casing or not getting the hog-ring tight enough to hold the ends together.

The casings have a nice long tag end of string that was used to tie the one end of the casing together. Is this extra tag end of string meant to be used to tie the other end closed and possibly to tie the two ends together?

Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for how to tie the bologna casing ends together?

Do you have any pictures or videos?

I tried doing some YouTube research, but was not able to find anything useful.

Any assistance that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

[Austin]

NDKoze I don’t have any pictures or videos, but here is what I would suggest…

After stuffing, twist the end of the open casing and use a hog ring to close it. While clipping on the hog ring, pull the two ends of the casing together and wrap the string from the already closed end around the end you are twisting and clipping. Clamp the hog ring on both the twisted end and the string. Then the string can be used to hang on smoke sticks.

Or, just twist and clip the casing with a hog ring, then loop and tie the string around both casing ends, then making a loop of string to hang on smoke sticks at that point.

Many times the string on the ring bologna casing can be placed under the hog ring used to close the other end, and then use the string to hang on smoke sticks. In one fashion or another, that string is typically used to hold the two ends together and hang on smoke sticks.

Let me know if we can help further.

I will try to add ring bologna to my to-do list for the future and get a video made to help visually demonstrate things better.