Been processing my own venison for a few years now and really enjoy it. New member here but I’ve been perusing quite a bit of helpful information on here. Nonetheless, we typically make hamburger meat, sausage, jerky, and snack sticks. Snack sticks are my fav taste by far but they always kick my butt during the stuffing process. I’ve always had trouble getting them to stuff very easily. Over the last couple years I’ve learned to add more water, don’t add cure the night before stuffing, etc. but I’m still struggling.

This year I had hell again. We have two stuffers, one old cast iron stuffer that says 8 qt but built like a tank and a cheaper 5# bought from academy a couple years ago. Used 19mm casing but had two problems, cast iron stuffer was way too hard to crank no matter how much water I added, and the cheap one is cheap foreign made junk. Started blowing seals, stripping metal gears, among other things. Not fun.

Only ideas of potential causes is that the diameter of the cast iron might be too large and maybe a taller/skinnier well built stuffer would help? Also concerned about the stuffing tube I use for the cast iron because it doesn’t taper down in size near the throat, it’s just a straight opening all the way to the collar. Are these crazy ideas? I really didn’t want to buy another stuffer if there was a way to utilize the cast iron built like a tank. But I’m out of ideas…

That’s genius, I love that idea.

processhead I did notice the socket, I have a few extras and some square tubing I have laying around that I’ll try to rig up. Great idea, thanks for the input.

Jonathon makes sense on the cure accelerator and going straight to stuffing, thanks.

I’m not exactly sure how much water I was adding, I only know that I added what I thought was a lot of water, had trouble, added more, to then getting blasted in the face with meat and water once the seal broke. Haha, it was quite the sight to see. And yes, I tried different setups with the seal thinking I might have it wrong but it blew out no matter how I tried it.

As for fat content, we used 50% beef(brisket) and 50% venison.