Cheap Meat Grinder

If it's anything like the numerous cheap meat grinder Northern tool sells, then it'll be fine. I wouldnt put any spacers in for fear of one becoming dislodged and ending up in the food. I've had a Northern Tool meat grinder for 15 years and used it a lot. It hasnt let me down yet.

I've LEM and its working fine. As your requirement is low, you can go with MeyKey one. It's cheap. Your primary task is to make sausages?

I actually had to shim the back of the auger since i felt the knife wasnt making adequate contact with the plate. After that, match honing the knife and plate made a big difference. Place the knife on the plate and see if it sits flat on the plate or if there are any gaps, use a flat surface like a piece of thick glass and 200 grit sand paper to sand both smooth. Now just make sure you use the same side of the knife every time since it's now matched to the blade.

Remember in the old days they just used 2 knives against each other.

It works quite well. So you take a knife in your right hand knife, and

another in your Left, and slice across the meat, criss cross as needed.
Easy to do one pound, not so much with 10.

Most augers have a washer at the back. Are you perhaps missing one on the China special? Photos of the auger assembly as laid out like it is ready to put in the grinder horn would help. You have 5/100th or 1/20th of an inch slop which sounds like about what a thin stainless washer would take up (to prevent the auger from rubbing directly on the body of the horn).

The knife should be in direct contact with the back of the grinder plate. Both of my grinders have enough thread left on the plate retention ring that I can over crank it, but the direct contact is where the cutting takes place. You did right by flattening the plate and knife with progressive grits on a sturdy flat surface. Once you get the spacing worked out, it should work even better. You can always shim a loose auger.

I've also bought a cheap meat grinder and it worked very well for a month. But one day we faced a problem that our new grinder started to make some strange noises. Turned out that we can't fix it, so we had to buy a new one.

At that time we decided to read more info about grinders, so we bought ALTRA. And now I can say this machine is AMAZING! I've been using it for a few month and I definitely love it. It's multifunctional, easy to clean and the quality of meat after that is better than we used to buy in the store.