Ok, bought an off brand #12 grinder. A nice heavy Vevor. Thing is clearly a pretty good chinese copy. Anyhow, looking to round out my selection of plates and knives. Thus far various #12 plates have all fit fine.

Today I got a very nice looking Pro-Cut carbide tipped #12 knife. Cost more, but I wanted to mate it to my 3mm (1/8") plate for faster final grind.

Anyhow, the center hole on this knife is not 1/2" like all the others, but only about 7/16". I am trying to find out if this is a one off problem with this knife, or are there some machines have a smaller square hole where the knife sits?

The square part of my auger measures precisely 12mm (1/2").

The knife is forged steel with carbide cutters brazed to the body. I touched the forged part with a file, and you can forget about filing out the center hole! Hard as heck!! And of course the carbide can only be sharpened with diamond. I actually own a set of diamond sharpeners for my wood working tools. Was really looking forward to this knife…

Thanks processhead. Looks like there is variation out there and others have experienced it in the #12 grinders as well. I don’t grind tons of meat. Perhaps I should just learn to sharpen the cheap (2 for $12.99 Amazon) knives and be happy.

I use a flat plate of glass with wet dry sandpaper to true various blades and mating surfaces for my other projects. I googled up grinder plate and blade sharpening and indeed there was a nice video on how to true up and resharpen grinder parts that way. Its really cool actually.

But the carbide tipped cutter looks like it would be a real performer. Afraid I should just send it back.

Too late to send the Chinese copy cat grinder back, and besides, it appears well built. Nothing against the stuff from Walton’s of course, but I was on a limited budget at the time.

I would worry that even a quality belt sander, while sufficiently true for woodworking might not be perfectly true to say 0.001" which is my language. I decked the heads of a subaru boxer block using plate glass, 320>400>600>800 grit sandpaper and WD-40 as lubricant (WD-40 was just what someone suggested on internet). Worked.

But conceptually, and for less than precise work, the belt sander might be the ticket for fast. I am really new to grinding meat, but not new to sharpening. I imagine that the better the plate and knife match, the better the grind. Makes me wonder if we should be smearing some valve lapping rouge on the plate and blade and running the grinder a bit first to mate the two surfaces. Just musing.

Looking at the various grinder knives I have in my possession thus far, they are really poorly ground and really not honed at all.

I don’t know. The geometry of the grinder/knife interface troubles me. If all four blades of the knife are not equally riding the disk, you end up with lots of poor cuts.