Meat Grinder Base

We picked up a decent sized grinder recently and wanted to mount it really solidly on the bench without having to bolt it to a huge piece of wood so it would still fit in the sink for cleaning.  The grinder was also sitting too low to put a bowl under it so it needed a little height to make it more useful, I have some spare steel in the garage and I figured that it would last better than wood if it was going to get wet.  Before we go any further, let me state that this design is overkill by a huge degree but I am working with the steel I have on hand and I doubt it will need replacing.

I started off with a piece of box steel, cut and bent it to fit the base solidly then clamped and welded it.  

the end of the steel had one square of steel on one end from some other project i hadn't used it for yet and I just cut another and welded it on the other side so that it would be easy to clean.

I went digging in my scrap steel bin and came out with some pieces that I could cut and weld into what was in my head for mounting easily.  The bench this is being mounted on currently was banged together in an afternoon from wood from the dump, we just needed some extra shelf and bench space in what we call the cats room because his food bowl is there but it has the deep freezer and the server lives there too.  The bench there is mostly used for dehydrating so that Shay has somewhere to lay out the fruits and things and put them in the dehydrator.  As a result of that I can bolt whatever I like to it to test ideas, I think it came up nice enough for now, but in our house I am planning to build the bench will have a spot for this.

I think you can see in the above and below pictures how I cut the steel and welded it together, its a bit frankenstein but its solid. I give it a lifetime warranty.

I ground, filed and sanded the new steel then gave it a coat of primer, it looked good enough but I wanted it to be really easy to clean so I decided to get some fibreglass to fill in the holes, I figured that with some bog, spray putty and a few coats of metallic silver it would look good as well as clean nicely.

At this point we tried it out and the design is solid and it works incredibly well, no movement whatsoever.  We did discover that its a bit too cumbersome for cleaning, I knew it was going to be heavy but it isn't the weight so much as the size that makes the problem.

I welded the bolts to the base so they were sticking up and easy to slide the grinder onto, I did this for ease if use, I could have done it the other way around, but it would have meant threading bolts through multiple holes with 2 heavy objects, this way is easier to use.  I knew that having it this way up I would either have to grind part of the leg away so that I could either use a normal wingnut or come up with an original solution, If I shortened the bolts it would be hard to do up the nuts without including a spanner in the deal and I didn't want to do that.  My solution was to make a custom wingnut for the job, with a spacer washer built in to it.   There's probably a name for one of these things but I have no idea what it is.

I started with some flat steel bar and cut off a couple of squares, then ground out the middle of one side so that a nut would fit in the gap.  I welded the nut to the bar and found a couple of things that came with some bolts I used in the bedhead I made (more on that another time) they were threaded on the inside but too big for the threads I was using, this made them good washers, I didn't even have to drill them out. I welded everything together and tested it out, it worked perfectly.

I  fibreglassed, primed and painted everything.

It seems OK, it wont win any fashion awards but I don't think I will need to replace it any time soon.  I think I rushed it a bit towards the end trying to get it finished before work tomorrow, I could have done with spending another day or so going over it again but for the amount of use it will get I really think this is fine.