Does it work as a meat saw? The answer is yes and no.
We buy a lot of our meat in bulk form and to our huskies delight we break it down and package it for the freezer. For many things a good set of knives is enough. We added in a meat slicer a few years back when Bill had to spend some team building gift cards. We have joked that we needed a bandsaw and reciprocating saw dedicated to meat processing. It’s not so funny anymore.
I did not know that pork steaks and country ribs came from the pork shoulder. We all love how Bill does pork steaks on the grill and for a long time country ribs have been one of my favorites. It has become difficult to find a nice pork steak in the grocery stores. They tend to be thin with bone chips in the meat. The same is true with much of the chicken we find in stores here. While I will still buy already broken down meat if the prices are good, for us it makes more sense to buy bulk and process it ourselves.
It seems like it costs more to break down your own meat if you need to purchase tools to use only for this one task. When I went to Bill with the idea of buying tools just to do this one thing I worried he would think I was crazy, oh my gosh I almost got through that with a straight face. Bill has NEVER passed up an opportunity to buy a new tool. He doesn’t need a reason he just needs me to start any sentence with, “I was thinking”.
| Martin’s Grocery | Walmart | Aldi | D&R | GFS | Sam’s Club | |
| Pork Shoulder | none | $2.24 | none | horrible website | $1.89 | $1.98 |
| Country Ribs bone in | $4.2/$3.79 | $2.98 | none | still bad | none | $3.87 |
| Pork Steak | none | $2.97/$3.17 | none | not getting better | none | none |
GFS also has a boneless pork shoulder for $1.79 GFS had bone in pork shoulder on sale for $1.39 which is what started this whole adventure. To be fair Aldi sometimes has products in their stores that don’t show up on their website. Sometimes the local grocery store will have different cuts of meat that I didn’t see on their website and D&R has a terrible website. D&R offers meat bundles which seem to be reasonably priced, their meat prices in store feel high but I like their butcher. Just looking at the prices and the fact that you can’t even find pork steaks all the time in any store you start to see why being able to break down our meat purchases makes sense. So how did the saw work and would we recommend it for this purpose.
I admit it was an impulse purchase. I was in Harbor Freight looking for the low temp weld sticks (which our store never has) when I saw the saw. It was on sale, normal price is listed at $27.99 on line. Bill purchased the A-KARCK Food Reciprocating Saw Blades for Frozen Meat 6 Pack, Unpainted Stainless Steel Saw Blades for Food Cutting Included 9″ and 12″ from Amazon, link here. You can find the Harbor Freight saw here. Update on those blades, he wasn’t happy with them. He has a set with finer teeth in the Amazon cart now he wants to try them before we go whole hog and start setting up our own walk in freezer/meat processing room. Sometimes it’s like I don’t even know him.
PROS
- It is cheap for under $30 plus another $16.99 for blades we could get started cutting up bone in meats.
- It was easy to find. We have a Harbor Freight here in town.
- Easy to setup. Tool out of box, put blade in, plug in and get started.
- It cut through the meat and bone.
This is what we can find around here at the grocery stores, when we can find it. They are thin and sometimes have a lot of bone fragments in them.
This is one of the eight Bill cut from that one pork butt. I wish I would have taken pictures before they were bagged and sealed but alas you must look at this beautiful, tempting, perfectly grilled pork steak. He rubs them with olive oil, sprinkles on garden seasoning and some salt and then cooks them on the grill. These are a family favorite. To put the size into context below is a 16 oz bottle of seasoning. I had to cram the meat monster into this dish to get it to fit. I think Bill cut these 3/4″ thick and we got 8 plus scrap for stir fry out of a single pork butt. You might think why so much meat? How can you eat that much? Bill and I usually share one and we did not leave the table hungry. The quality of the final product is definitely a big pro.
CONS
- The thing is huge and heavy.
- It takes two hands to use.
- It’s not meant for meat which makes clean up complicated.
- Because you need two hands to use it meat bits and goo get all over the tool which requires toothpicks to get it all out.
- Because you need two hands if you need to hold the meat to make the cut you hopefully have a friend standing by. One who trusts you, a lot, they will be holding meat with their 10 digits next to a blade that you are running.
Do I regret the purchase? Yes and no. I think we will look at other solutions. Bill is talking about a smaller saw something more like the smaller, light weight, one handed Milwaukee saw. I’m thinking maybe we see what the local feed store gets in around hunting season. They often have bandsaws for processing and while I know that sounds a little over the top, and it is, it might be a better tool. I feel like being able to have both hands available to work is helpful. I also want something that will be easier to clean. More than likely that means buying something that was designed with meat processing in mind. If you are making a product to cut meat hopefully you are thinking of ways to make it easy to disinfect.
Would I recommend you buy this saw to process meat? Only if you can handle a saw that is fairly long and heavy that requires you to use both hands on it while making your cuts. If you are looking to make neat precise cuts this is not the tool. If you don’t want to spend time with picks cleaning out the buttons and grooves and making sure it’s all disinfected after your done, this is not the tool. If you want to just see what all this is about before committing to spending money on a better setup, this might be something you would be interested in. For under $50 we were able to give it a try, figure out some things that we didn’t like and dial in on things we know we want. Plus now we have another saw and actually I’m looking at some foam pieces I had wanted to cut. Now I can try this and see if it works before I grab Bill’s good saws and booger them up with spray foam.
