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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/06/2023 in all areas

  1. I managed to evade the temptations of the KK shopping channel, for once! I put @Paul's suggestion of a sawzall to my husband and he wasn't sure about being able to clean it properly between uses. I then did extensive research into bandsaws. I came up with a blank every time. Not many online reviews and the ones I did find were frankly awful - mostly regarding the suppliers and after sales service. @MacKenzie kindly(?) found me a video with a guy using a Scotts meat bandsaw. It has some awesome technology that stops the saw when your hands get too close to the saw while wearing a pair of special blue gloves. It was also huge and likely to have a price tag to match! Finally, I came upon a company that had been trading for over 30 years who had what looked like a standard meat bandsaw for a sensible price (about £600). They were off for the Christmas period so I had to wait for a response to my email. That was a good thing. I had a cooling off period, decided I do not need a meat bandsaw cluttering up my life and set to with a normal saw this morning. I was not looking forward to it but got all of these cut and sawn in just over 20 minutes. Hurrah! And the rump steaks came out well too. All done!
    3 points
  2. Yes, thanks @tony b and @MacKenzie. 2023 has started off well. I have banned myself from ordering anything at all online for the whole month of January in an effort to break the "add to cart" habit that I have developed. So far so good.
    2 points
  3. A local farmer about an hour's drive from us here in the South of England rears really tasty rose veal. He gets it butchered and sells it at a premium at farmers markets. I wanted to butcher it myself to get the cuts I like but, somehow, got the timing wrong and now have a whole hindquarter of veal in my house to cut up just two days before Christmas! I drove to the farm to pick it up yesterday afternoon and here is all 60kg of animal spread out on my kitchen counter last night. I could barely lift the leg and ended up cutting off the shin before stuffing the rest of the leg in our big commercial fridge downstairs. I got up early today to scrub, salt and wipe down my butcher's block. It's not been used for this purpose for years. The Husband arrived back from Sweden last night and was not impressed at the prospect of having to deal with a huge carcass over Christmas. I think I will do this slowly over two days and enjoy it. When I read about the Americans on the forum talking about the price of meat I am amazed at how cheaply you can buy it. I think that I do well by buying animals whole, or in the case of steers by the quarter, but I suspect you would think this expensive. The 60kg (including all the bones) cost £600 which feels super cheap at £10/kg. Anyway, off to start my adventure...
    1 point
  4. It has taken me most of my life to truly appreciate this, but there isn't a saw tool category sold without a "better" version ignored by people who think all saws are the same, and there isn't a saw tool sold that doesn't benefit from a very careful choice of aftermarket blade. While my wife insists for environmental reasons that we ride out the OEM tires on new cars, a careful aftermarket choice is always an upgrade, whether one wants performance, a quiet ride, or simply making it less likely to die in the rain. One should similarly think of the blade that comes with any saw as like the "starter" toner cartridge in a new printer. Conventional advice is tuned for average needs, for people working in haste on a budget. I generally replace track saw blades and such with a blade that makes the smoothest cut I can tolerate teasing out, working slower than a production shop. My favorite example is a jigsaw. I owned a cheap hand-me-down that convinced me the category was crap, jigsaws are just small reciprocating saws with a reference plane, good only for demolition. Then I bought a decent Dewalt jigsaw, and started playing with blades. Often one does want a stiff, wide blade, but for scrolling, this blade can do finished curved work that would make Michelangelo happy: BU2DCS-2 Dual Cut - Wood Cutting Jig Saw Blade As for cutting frozen meat with a hacksaw, the best mainstream hacksaws have excellent tension control, and can be strung with the force of a piano string. I keep one of the best blades I could find just for cooking. The quality range I've experiences with hacksaws is every bit as wide as the quality range I've experienced with jigsaws. Anyone, be sure you're experiencing top-of-the-market quality for your chosen tool, before investing time, space, and money on a more complex tool you might not need.
    1 point
  5. .... and you got it done in less time than it would take to clean up and store a bandsaw, plus using your muscles.
    1 point
  6. 1 point
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