Summary

This mount adapts a KitchenAid grinder for use on a Ronco Pasta Machine base.

Instructions

I wanted to make sausage, so was searching for a meat grinder, and found a brand new KitchenAid grinder (with the sausage attachment!!) at a thrift store, for $10.

But I don't own the KitchenAid mixer. But I did have faith, and bought it anyway...

Eventually, I made this mounting bracket to fit a previous thrift store find... A Ronco Pasta Maker. They are pretty common at thrift stores these days. Many people bought them, but didn't use them very much. I found one in as-new condition, with ALL the accessories, for about $8. Over time, I bought three, mostly for the powerful base motors, and for spare parts, and one is now devoted to this grinder attachment.

The pasta maker will make real good fresh pasta if you know what you are doing. It can mix and then extrude a rather large batch of thick dough, so I felt the base motor would be plenty powerful enough to grind meat too. The Pasta machine power take-off rotates at 120 RPM (2 rotations per second) and that seemed about right.

The pasta machine comes apart easily with just four screws. The front shell-half to which bolts are mounted is nothing but a thick plastic shell. Once hole positions are marked, it's a simple matter to drill the 4 holes.

The KitchenAid grinder attachment gets very high customer ratings as a good little grinder, and it works great for me. It's a good design, it grinds meat real well, and is easy to clean.

There is very little stress on the massive printed mount bracket so it's plenty strong enough. Surprising to me was that the printed drive shaft is also strong enough. You'd think (at least I did) that the torque of the motor would probably snap this shaft, and while I tried to reinforce it in the design stage, I still predicted needing to make one out of a stronger material. But after several hours of use it shows no signs of stress.
Anyway, if I accidentally drop a bone in the grinder, that shaft will no doubt break first, so it's sort of like a safety fuse..

Note that the base plate on the mount is slightly tapered to match the slope on the face of the pasta maker. So, it is not flat on your build plate. One edge is raised up. I only mention this because some people have complained when files are not flat on the bottom. Don't ask me why they don't like it....

The mount took about 4 hours and used 150 grams of ABS on an Afinia, with 0.35mm layers.
Files are SAE. On the million to one chance someone else will actually do this, and needs metric, scale the stl files up by a factor of 25.4.

Mount for a KitchenAid grinder