Need a recommendation for quality a meat grinder

For years I've always borrowed an old plastic Oster meat grinder and while it works I consider it far from ideal. I figured it's time to pony up for my own but I don't want to buy a cheap Chinese plastic model. I'm looking to stay around $300. Does anyone have experience with the Weston Butcher Series or one of the LEM Big Bite grinders or maybe one of the Cabela's models?

I ended up buying the LEM stuffer, the 10lb capacity one.  Pricey but boy is it a lot easier than using the grinder.  It will take me 2 years to break even on costs of everything vs taking my meat in, but I don't see how it could really break either so it should last a very long time.  Good use of Christmas money.  The grinder worked but I noticed after mixing in the seasoning the meat got more tacky and it was harder to push down into the grinder to stuff the casings.  I'd push it down and as I took the stomper out it would stick to it and come back out.  The actual stuffer is just a crank handle and works much smoother.

I ground fatty pork butt in my grinder and it was fine using the 10mm plate for the first grind.  I then tried the 3mm plate for hotdogs and it was a disaster.  I ended up having to use the 4.5mm plate first, then go to the 3mm plate.  That worked great.  So I guess I can't go from the coarsest to the finest directly.  Lesson learned there, but that also made hotdogs more of a pain to make than other stuff that I can do in 2 grinds.

I did every I could think of. My meat had some fat on it but I was trying to grind up mostly meat cubed. Everything got gunked up. 

I ended up taking it to a local butcher. He ran the meat through his grinder and packed everything in 1 lb. packages. His charge was $8.43.

I have a LEM 25 lb. mixer so I will get my venison, pork and spices mixed. 

Does anyone have an opinion on the ease of stuffing the sausage ?

Thanks in advance,

Dodger

I bought the LEM 12 like lake shiner did. I had exactly the same experience as Lake Shiner with venison. 

We bought a hog, butchered the pig and I'm working on grinding the pork trimmings for making sausage. What a mess !! I gave up after the first attempt. Today I'm going to try to get it done. I looked online for some tips. The meat was cold but not hard chilled, and the grinder was room temperature. Today the meat is hard chilled and the grinder parts are in the freezer. 

I will let everyone know how it goes after another attempt today.

I also have a LEM Big Bite grinder and have been very happy with it. My brother went with the Cabela's grinder ( 3/4 size) and he has been happy with his grinder.

I have a 3/4 hp from Cabelas, #22 grinder. Can grind a deer twice in ten minutes. Heavy and bulky but kicks butt.

I recently bought the #12 LEM Big Bite grinder from Fleet Farm when it was on sale.  It was drastically different than the cheap one I had been using.  For the first grind when you are just putting in chunks of meat, it ground it up as fast as I could feed it.  After that you have to push in the coarse ground meat so that's not quite as quick, but still quicker than my old one.  One thing I noticed is that it didn't seem to clog up as much.  My old one would have it start pushing out the sides of the grind plate, but this one didn't do that.  Worked a lot better.

I also used the stuffing tubes it came with.  Was pretty easy to stuff sausages with it.  I did buy 2 more grinding plates for it to accommodate different sausage textures.  Overall I'm very happy with it.