Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After wearing out three consumer grade slicers, I stepped up to this product. My family makes its own pastrami, corned beef and lunch meat. Usually we make a large batch and the last step is slicing and vacuum packing. Our slicer will operate for three hours at a time which is hard on a consumer grade slicer with plastic internal parts. Typically its the plastic gears which break. After doing some research and not wanting to spend more than $300, we ended up buying this one. Admittedly there was some concern after reading reviews describing how hard it is to disassemble and clean, but we bought it anyway. We also wanted reviews that included photos so we also decided to have the camera handy as we used it. The carrier, Fedex in our case, delivered it on time and we found it to be very well packaged in a heavy cardboard box with a very sturdy Styrofoam inner liner. Our initial inspection found no damage or missing parts. The slicer had a very slight coating of oil to prevent corrosion. Before our first use, we decided to do a through cleaning. See our photos. So what does it take to clean this machine? Not much. You will need the normal cleaning supplies you would expect plus a phillips head screwdriver. Here are the steps, also see the photos. 1. Loosen the knob holding the sharpening unit and remove the guard. 2. Loosen the knob holding holding the center blade guard and remove it and the guard. 3. Using the phillips head screwdriver, remove the three screws holding the blade and remove the blade. Be careful, its razor sharp!! That is it, begin cleaning. Reassembly means reversing the steps. We were able to disassemble in about three minutes and reassemble in the same time. Plan on spending 20-30 minutes to do a through cleaning, there are lots of places for scraps to collect. So how does it work? Initially just to get a handle on how it works, we sliced a potato. This slicer was able to get it paper thin. So thin you could see through it. The slice was of consistent thickness and smooth. As you can see in the photo its thin enough to see my fingers through it. It is obvious from the construction that this machine is sturdy. There are no plastic parts except handles, and the slides are cast aluminum and move on real ball bearings. This thing is sturdy. Next was ten pounds of pastrami. No problem, it did not even break a sweat. There was no overheating or slowing down. It is obvious that this machine is sturdy there was no flexing or binding and the slide operated smoothly on its ball bearings and the slice thickness remained consistent throughout the process. Again we cleaned the slicer using the process described. Interesting to note that we found no accumulation behind the blade making us question if we really need to clean it each time. However not removing the blade limits assess to various accumulation areas behind the blade guard. So here are some final thoughts. This is definitely not a consumer grade slicer. It is heavy, 50 pounds, the parts are heavy. You will need a tool to disassemble it. It probably is not the product for someone who only occasionally slices a bit of cheese. Its intended buyer will be someone who will do quite a bit of slicing each time its used. In this role it probably cant be beat. We have no regrets buying it so far and will keep this review updated as we continue to use it. Along with the slicer we also purchased a dedicated table/stand with wheels for it.