How to quickly sharpen a meat grinder knife using a shurik

I visit my mother once every six months. And on the day of my arrival, she always prepares dumplings. Comrades, these dumplings can be swallowed with a fork. But that's not what this is about. In general, on one of my visits the process stalled at twisting the meat. The knife in the meat grinder has become completely dull. He doesn’t want to chop the meat into any shape, he pushes the pieces back. I had to quickly fix this issue. Fortunately, in the car I still had a shurik (screwdriver) and a simple but useful device that I made myself. 2 minutes for sharpening, and you can turn the minced meat.

How to quickly sharpen a meat grinder knife?

For a long time, like everyone else, I sharpened the meat grinder knife on sandpaper by hand. A reliable method, but tedious. You need to run the knife counterclockwise in a circle for at least half an hour, first on paper with medium grain, then with fine grain. And so on until the blades become mirror smooth.

In the summer I saw how my neighbor in the garage automated this process. The gist is this:

Attach the knife from the meat grinder to the screwdriver.
Place the glass with sandpaper glued on the table. Or you can use a sharpening stone with the surface untouched.
Shurik in reverse, lightly press the knife with its entire plane to the skin.
We sharpen at low speeds and only the flat side.
After 2 minutes, use a knife from a meat grinder to cut at least a thread.

It is imperative to glue the sandpaper onto something smooth (I prefer glass).Otherwise, the edges of the paper lift up, and the cutting edge falls off, the edges of the blade become rounded. When sharpening with a shura, the likelihood of damaging the blades is much higher. I advise you not to neglect this rule.

How to make a device for sharpening with a shurik?

To sharpen a meat grinder knife with a shura, you will need a suitable bolt, a steel spring and a pair of nuts.

The bolt head will need to be ground down on a belt machine to the size of the hole in the knife. I turned to a neighbor for help, since I don’t have such a machine. I gave him the bolt and hole measurements. It only takes 5 minutes of work, but the device will last forever.

Then everything is simple. We assemble the structure:

We insert the bolt with the hat into the hole of the knife.
We install the spring.
We screw the two nuts so that the spring is tightened.
We tighten the nuts well so that they do not come loose when sharpening.
We fix the bolt in the screwdriver chuck, and you can start sharpening.

Mesh sharpening

When sharpening a knife from a meat grinder, you also need to sharpen the mesh. She is also involved in the process of cutting meat. The cutting edge around the holes should remain sharp and the knife and mesh should fit snugly together.

We sharpen only one side, which is directed into the meat grinder. The principle is the same. In general, the cleaned areas are very clearly visible on the mesh - light and shiny. There should be no dark spots left.

To attach it to the shura, you will need another device. Here's how to do it:

Take a small aluminum plate.
We cut it to length to fit the mesh size.
We drill three holes: in the center for a large bolt that will be inserted into the screwdriver chuck, and on the sides two small ones for thin bolts.
Screw a nut onto a thick bolt, put a plate on it, and secure it with a second nut.
In the same way, we secure the plate on the sides using thin bolts and nuts.
As a result, all bolts should be the same length and clearly fit into the holes in the mesh.
We put a spring on a large bolt, lower the device into the mesh from the meat grinder and sharpen it in the same way as a knife.

Perhaps professional sharpeners will not approve of the method of sharpening with a screwdriver (most likely). But I sharpened my meat grinder knives this way more than once or twice. Everything spins great. The minced meat turns out good, not porridge. My mother’s dumplings and my wife’s cutlets are delicious. Meat grinders grind even stringy turkey and beef without effort. The wires are not wound around the knife. For those who, like me, like to do their work quickly and without problems, this method is super.