Flattening meat grinder discs is a pain -- any powered options?

[UncleBoots]

Normally I eschew electricity for sharpening things. I like the feel of sharpening. Human-powered jigs like the Hapstone, no problem, I enjoy that, but if I were to move to powered belts and wheels and such, I'd really be losing my form of the essential pleasure of sharpening. But I'll happily make an exception for this case.

For background, the business part of a meat grinder consists of a blade piece with 4 "knives" formed into its surface (some are more blade-like than this), and a flat disc with holes for the meat to come through (they all seem to have this). "Sharpening" this system consists of flattening both of these pieces so that they are both absolutely flat, so that no meat, especially no connective tissue from the short ribs I am trying to grind with chuck for my dream burgers, can escape.

The piece with the 4 "blades" is no problem, but those discs! I thought I'd have it easy, because my grinder isn't even a real grinder, just a KitchenAid attachment with smaller discs, and instead of the sandpaper used by the YouTube people, I had my diamond plates in 200-400-800-1800. It took forever to flatten the thing on the 200, which I'd thought of as a fast-cutting stone. 90 minutes, two hours, I don't know, and that's just for one of the sides; I skipped the other. My forearms are sore. This is not The Zen of Sharpening. This is just a big pile of work. So I am really open to a powered alternative, but I'm not sure what it would be. You want to make the thing absolutely flat, but you don't want to take too much metal off, or make it lopsided, as in not 90 degrees relative to the sides.

Is there a way to use electricity for something like this? Or would the sandpaper have actually cut faster than my diamond stones?

 

[David Martin]

I have used a coarse / fine SiC stone with success.. DM

 

[kreisler]

so what's the task at hand? sharpening a cutting disc like on a Graef bread slicing machine? or mean-flattening a metal surface?

 

[UncleBoots]

so what's the task at hand? sharpening a cutting disc like on a Graef bread slicing machine? or mean-flattening a metal surface?

Flattening a metal surface

 

[Obsessed with Edges]

This may or may not be a working option for the Kitchenaid, I don't know. But it's an interesting look at a device used with other meat grinders, using abrasive discs (maybe SiC) mounted concentricly to the grinder's drive shaft. The grinder's own powered drive is used to run them. One disc is used to sharpen the blade, the other is used for the plate.

One thing I see in this method, that might be harder to do by other freehand means, is how the concentric-mounted abrasive discs should ensure that the cutting surfaces (blade and plate) would be maintained perfectly perpendicular to the drive shaft and also planar to one another. I could see how trying to abrade by other means, freehand, might result in the newly 'flat' surfaces being not planar anymore.