Hydraulic-Powered Sausage Stuffer

Hydraulic-Powered Sausage Stuffer FARM HOME Food 27-1-30 Thanks to deer hunting and the home butchering of hogs and cattle, Matthew Frey, Pocahontas, Illinois, makes a lot of sausage. So do his neighbors. But everyone dreaded putting meat through the manual sausage stuffer because you couldn't help but get a sore arm. Frey figured mechanizing the process would save time and muscle, so he looked around the farm to see what he could use. He found a power steering pump from a '68 IH 2-ton truck, a used 1/2 hp electric motor, a 2-way valve and a 3-in. hydraulic cylinder. Frey dismantled, thoroughly cleaned, and rebuilt the cylinder, valve and pump, putting in new O-rings and seals. Then he built a frame for his 2-gal. capacity sausage stuffer. Above the crock, he attached the hydraulic cylinder to the plate that pushes the meat through the stuffer to fill sausage sleeves. He mounted the power steering pump and electric motor on a separate frame and powers the pump with a V-belt from the motor. He plumbed the pump into a quick-connect outlet, so he can just plug in the hoses to the cylinder that powers the stuffer. "I'm using vegetable oil rather than hydraulic oil in the cylinder and pump," Frey says. "It works as well as hydraulic oil, and I figured it would be better to have some kind of edible oil in the system in case it should leak a little. We change the oil a couple times a year to keep it fresh." "I put it all together in one evening in my shop," he says. "Our first thought was to use air pressure, but we couldn't develop enough pressure to push the meat through. So we scrapped that in favor of hydraulics." Frey says he used the stuffer the day after he built it to stuff about 800 lbs. of sausage. "It worked fine, and it was a lot faster than doing it by hand. Normally it would have taken a couple of days to make that much sausage, but we got through it all in less than a day," he says. He says the hydraulic stuffer has been used for stuffing all kinds of sausage, from bratwurst to summer sausage to hot sticks. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Matthew Frey, 136 Locust Creek Rd., Pocahontas, Ill. 62275-3642 (ph 618 669-2361).

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