meat mincer and sausages

The email for the casing came with:

Casings

Most of our casings are tubed. Soak the natural casings on the tubes overnight, after soaking, take them off the tube stretching them to the full length, before sliding them on the filler tube of the sausage stuffer. 

NEVER SOAK COLLAGEN CASINGS.

Casings do have a smell.
When the casings arrive you will notice a smell, (Sheep casings more then
hogs casings) this is normal and you do not have to be concerned.
This is what I found on the net for you.
"My casings smell bad, are they still good?
Usually Yes. When your natural casings first arrive there may be some gas
build up in the bag, especially in hot weather. This can smell pretty strong.
What can I do to knock out the bad smell in my casings?
Usually, all it needs is airing out. Leave the bag open in the cooler for a
while. Or, take casings out of the bag and air them out. If it is really bad,
rinse casings in freshwater, re-soak in brine and the smell will usually
dissipate.
Putting baking soda in your soak water may also help."
My experience is that when you keep them in the fridge most of the smell
will disappear and when you soak and rinse them according to instructions it
will not be noticeable in the taste of your sausages.

The casings are cured in salt and we advise to store them in the fridge.
When stored in the fridge they will keep for a very long time (years)
Have you got any leftovers? Place them in a container and add plenty of salt.
Store them in the fridge.
This vid seems to be worth following :

I'll give it a try, as I've a couple of kilo's of pork shoulder I've got to mince first, as well as some beef. 

• skinned the pork shoulder, cut out the bone. 
• scored the pork skin which I will cook in air fryer for crackling. 
• put the bone in the air fryer just to cook a little and I'll freeze it for puttin in a soup stock later. 
• cut up the pork and fat and put in a ziplock bag and put in freezer. (Some video's suggest easier to grind if meat frozen, otherwise fat gets all stringy. 

I've cut some nice lean bit of pork up to do a pork sweeet and sour. See that blog.

Sat 18th April, making sausages

I took the pork from the freezer, it was  quite solid, so I had to let it thaw before I could break pieces off to be able to put in the tube. 
 I used the middle sieve on the meat mincer but after a while it clogged up, there was a fil m of fat on the inside that blocked the holes, especially near the center, and the blade got clogged with fat too. On reverse nothing really happened. 
I di find the pizza slot , very course plate, worked pretty effectively with the cold meat, not as well on the 2nd run once the meat had warmed up a bit. 
I threaded the pig skin onto the nozzle, I'd soakd it overnight in water, then put it into a pottle in the fridge as I didn't use it the next day. The nozzle was a bit big and it took a while to thread the skin onto the nozzle. 
I'd cut a 2m length off to use for the first batch. The overall length is 10m. 
I ground some pork up, about 35o g and mixed it with some parsley, salt, pepper and chilli flakes. I use 2% of salt by meat weight, s about 7g which I weighed on the scale. 
  I mixed it all up and then used the nozzle to put the sausage in the skins. Because the nozzle is quite big, some air got in, and I had to reshape the sausages after to get rid of excess air. 
It all went pretty well, but that batch, 350g only made about 3 1/2 sausages. I shaped them into 4. So 2 normal sized ones and 2 small. It only came to about 500mm lenth of skin so I left the rest on the nozzle, put some water in a ziplock bag and removed the air and left it in the fridge. 

 you can see the clogged nozzle in the above image

 Some rough ground (left bowl) and some medium ground.

 I decided to cook 2 in air fryer and 2 in frying pan. They all came out good and very tasty, I was really please with the end result. Very filling too. I might lighten up on the salt next time around and only use maybe 1 1/2 percent rather tan 2% salt per meat weight. They tasted fresh and tasty, they had good flavour too, I am very pleased with the result. 
The rough sieve has quite chunky mince and that may be good for bratwurst type sausages, or toulouse ones. I need to do some research on sausage types. 
A bit of effort but a very pleasing result.