The best things in life may be free but they sure do take a lot of maintenance. The latest best free thing I’ve got going is a meat grinder my neighbor Gene hooked me up with. So far my friends and I have processed three elk and one deer worth of hamburger and sausage meat through this bad boy. Pretty sure this grinder could double as a wood chipper. It’s heavy duty. Also just heavy. I don’t know what it weighs, but I need to take a few deep breaths and make an appointment at the chiropractor before attempting to move it. And that’s how the trouble began.

I lifted the grinder onto a rolling kitchen island, swept up my vertebrae that had shot out during that process, then left the house for a while. When I came back I found the grinder on the floor and the kitchen island tipped over. It was upright when I left, so I guess the only explanation is that the weight of the grinder slowly compacted the earth’s crust, that squished the lava around down in the mantle, threw our planet out of balance, we got a wobble in the orbit and, boom, kitchen island tips right over and grinder down.

An oil spill had oozed out, covering my kitchen floor. Never crossed my mind that an appliance would have crankcase oil but, like I said, this thing is stout. Hard to describe how ancient this oil was. It had more of an absence of light than any color. Like it may turn back into a dinosaur before too long. I made the mistake of going to the Internet for advice on gear oil for a meat grinder. That was a mistake.

Some people swear you should have food-grade lubricant for such an application. Sounds right. So I spent a day or so trying that route. Called friends with local restaurants. Went by or talked to nearly every Wallowa County business that sells any kind of oil. Then I heard you should just replace all the seals and use regular gear oil. Seals? That took more days off my life and sent me on another round of visiting local hardware and parts dealers.

I ended up taking everything entirely apart. Got a part number off a seal made when Eisenhower was president of his elementary student body. Got that part ordered. Figured I’d clean ‘er up inside and out, repaint everything and go for the total overhaul while she was in pieces.

Found out the original part number no longer means the same thing. The guys at NAPA are patient. I mean real patient. Finally figured out the proper size, then I went ahead and broke that trying to put Humpty Grindy back together again. Bent the next one, too, but by now I didn’t care if my elk burger was marinated in gear oil or not.

My favorite part of getting it all reassembled was when I went to clean up the meat grinder after finally getting it operational again and running some elk through. When I repainted the grinder, I chose the color according to which can of spray paint was closest to me at the time. Kind of a dark maroon. Or, as I discovered, you could describe it as exactly the color of raw meat. The one thing I would like to show up against the background of this machine is precisely the color I chose to paint the machine. Literally any other color in the world would have been fine. But I went with raw meat color.

But, hey. It was free. Just took a little elbow grease, a new kitchen floor, messing around for the better part of a week and the kind assistance of nearly every Wallowa County business that has anything at all to do with hardware, kitchen supply, auto parts, petroleum products and meat-colored spray paint.

That last batch of elk turned out pretty good. I may start adding a drop or two of SAE 80W-85W-90 Premium Performance to all my meat dishes. Got a nice mellow flavor.

Jon Rombach is a local meat grinder restoration expert and columnist for the Chieftain.