Homemade Sausage Making

What I'm looking for here is someone to tell me if I've made bad assumptions or I misunderstand something.

Given a cylindrical volume (like the hopper of a vertical sausage stuffer) that holds a certain amount of meat, you can work out the volume. With that volume and the diameter of the casings, you should be able to work out what length of casing you need.

Assumption #1: I'm not accounting for extra on the ends or extra for the twisting off of indivdual links. (That may be ok because the casings stretch.)
Assumption #2: The casings have a constant diameter. (That may be ok because it goes a bit bigger or a bit smaller, so you can choose an average diameter.)

Volume of a cylinder is V= Π ● r² ● h. My stuffer is the 5-lb LEM, which has a height of 8 inches and a diameter of 4.875 inches, so a radius of 2.4375 inches. So hopper volume is 149.324 cubic inches and that holds 5 pounds of ground meat.

Suppose my casing diameter is 32 mm i.e. 1.26 inches. So the casing radius is 0.63 inches. Using the same equation for the same volume of meat, but with the diameter and length of the casing (which is also a cylinder).... you can solve for h. You get h = V / (Π ● r²), which in this case is 149.324 / (Π ● 0.63 ● 0.63) = 119.76 inches or approximately 10 feet.

Am I correct in saying that 5 pounds of meat should be stuffed into 10 feet of 32-mm casing?

What's a good estimate for the extra needed in case the two assumptions above do not hold? (I'm guessing 25%... so I'd measure off 12.5 feet of 32-mm casing.)

Please criticise if you see something wrong in any of this.

That is close enough. You can drop all but one decimal. 3.14 is good enough for pi in this case.

ssorllih wrote:3.14 is good enough for pi in this case.

Sacrilege! ....................

Actually, that's why I used the symbol. People can round any way they choose.

If you ask an engineer for the value of pi he will tell you 3.14159 but just to be on the safe side use 4.

ssorllih wrote:If you ask an engineer for the value of pi he will tell you 3.14159 but just to be on the safe side use 4.

Well, I'm a software engineer now, but I was once a mathematician. If it doesn't have infinitely many decimal points, it just isn't accurate. So I use whatever Excel allows and round at the end.

Simple, weigh out 5 lbs. of mixed sausage meat, stuff into your regular hog cases then measure the filled length and record that number for future refrence as a guide.

Big Guy wrote:Simple, weigh out 5 lbs. of mixed sausage meat, stuff into your regular hog cases then measure the filled length and record that number for future refrence as a guide.

Yup...practical...but not as much fun as an equation.

Big Guy and I went to different schools together!

laripu wrote:Yup...practical...but not as much fun as an equation.

That depends on how much brain power you want to use Use to much trying to second guess your answer to your equation may cause you to drink Chuckwagon's and Big Guy's method allows you to make more sausage and drink more without the added brain drain

Yup, like I said... Big Guy, JBK101, and I went to different schools together!

For what it's worth, this casing length calculator was posted on another site and can be downloaded here: http://www.lartigiano.co.uk/Documents/Casing.zip

It uses metric measurements.