When I first decided to start making my own sausage I just used my wife’s popular model food processor with its meat grinder attachment. Using an often suggested method of putting your pre-gound meat in the freezer for 30 minutes before grinding to firm it up, I ground about 15 pounds of port shoulder before I burned up the motor in the food processor. Wanting to stay on my wife’s good side and avoid any additional consternation, I opted not to use her new food processor to grind meat. After hunting around on the internet I came across the STX-1800. After reading about half of the reviews and noticing that most reviewers were happy to very happy with the customer service and the performance their machines, I decided to purchase a unit.After my 1800 arrived I played with it a little to make sure everything worked. One reviewer noted his machine didn’t work out of the box and a replacement was immediately sent after he contacted customer service. Everything worked and all of my extra components were there. I read the owners manual from cover to cover. This was a good idea because there were some good food safety tips in there I hadn’t thought of.My first experience with my new machine was to make bulk turkey sausage. Using the previously mentioned process of firming up the meat in the freezer, I was able to grind through the entire bird in short order (sorry I didn’t actually time myself). Another reviewer made a comment that he almost couldn’t keep up with the grinder, I figured I’d believe that when I saw it. Well, I saw it! The machine was grinding the meat so fast I almost couldn’t keep up feeding it in. I WAS IMPRESSED! When I was done, something that I didn’t expect to surprise me was how easy it was to clean up.My next experience was to make bulk chicken sausage. I used the same freezer firming method and I ground about 25 pounds of sausage. At one point during this stint of sausage making I got sidetracked and time got away from me. By the time I got back to my freezer tray the chicken was substantially more than firmed up, it was frozen solid. I wasn’t sure if I should run the meat through the grinder or not, but I decided to try a couple of pieces and see how well it would work or not. The grinder barely showed any sign of effort, it just ground through the frozen meat. NOW I AM REALLY IMPRESSED!!!After that experience I definitely would recommend this machine to anyone that is serious about grinding meat (as matter of fact, I did)! The only downside issue, if you want to call it a downside, is that (as also noted by a couple of other reviewers) the motor is a little noisy. I have worked around industrial machinery most of my life so for me, this is not an issue. It is what I would expect from a motor with almost 3/4 horse power.