Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm no newbie to ice cream makers. I have several at home, and several at my restaurant, from hand-cranks to compressor-styles. I ordered this one because I needed a 6-quart out of season, and this was the only model I could find on Amazon. I thought, for $80, it must work well. There were only 4 other reviews, all positive, so it's entirely possibly the unit shipped to me was defective, but this was my experience: As others have mentioned, the bucket is nice and the motor is fairly quiet (though it contains plastic gears). My problem is with the design of the dasher. The dasher is supposed to rotate along the inside wall of the ice cream vessel so close (ie, 1-2mm) that it scrapes off the freezing ice cream, allowing new base to contact the wall, to then be scraped off again on the dasher's next pass. My dash was so small that it allowed about 1/2" of space between the wall, meaning the ice cream base could freeze so firmly and THICKLY that the dasher would get stuck. After 15-20 minutes, the motor would stop, there would be 1/2" of solidly frozen ice cream along the walls, with the rest of the base still liquid. I'd have to remove the vessel, scrape the walls, whisk the frozen bits back into the base, replace the dasher, start the machine again, and deal with the same problem again in 10 minutes. For my next batch, I tried backing off on the rock salt-to-ice ratio, allowing for warmer temps, but the same thing happened. I churned 6 separate batches of ice cream in this machine before giving up. All the batches resulted in under-frozen base with some really hard chunks of ice cream throughout. If the dasher were millimeters larger, this problem wouldn't occur. Poor mechanical design is what I'm chalking it up to. Returning the unit.