Not to belabor my sausage nightmare, but these calculations may help you help me:

I started with 15.2 lb of ground beef. 10 lb was a 28/72 mix of fat to lean, 5 lb was a 20/80 mix. The fat content of this meat block should have been 3.8 lb or 25%. After processing my resulting product weighed 12.8 lbs of finished sausage excluding the casings. This is a loss of 2.4 lbs, which seems to me excessive. Most of the loss, in my opinion was fat lost during smoking. There was a lot of liquid fat in the water pan, between 2 and 3 cups. The product is dry, has a poor mouth feel and although the taste is a good summer sausage flavor, it seems more like the consistency of a hot dog or bologna but drier.

Greg