New Star Foodservice1029055 Extra Heavy Duty Aluminum Frame Vegetable Slicer Lettuce Cutter

Easy to use

effective

I bought this for chopping cabbage to can. It is absolutely wonderful. It is now very quick to cut up several heads of cabbage to can.

Thought I was buying something that would be a real labor saver. Guess what? It is more work than just chopping the old way. Began as a problem just assembling it. I am a mechanical engineer with over 50 years experience designing, assembling, repairing, etc. But just getting this thingamajig assembled was frustrating. There is not much to assemble but to begin with, the gadget has to have a the Handle Locking Pin removed. Sounds easy until it is discovered that the pin is fastened by a very small snap ring which leaves no room to grasp with needle nose pliers or with tips large enough to get a screwdriver tip beneath to lift it off. I've worked with snap rings at least a thousand times without difficulty but this one was one I couldn't remove. After over a half hour trying to get it off, I was ready to give up and sent the damn contraption back but one last try with a screwdriver, I was able to pop it off. But then, the pin had to be re-installed in another hole and again, because of its small size, it was difficult to get it back on. What a bad design. I can think of several ways to do it better but I am not getting paid to do their design. The rest of the assembly however, went easyNow I was ready to do some chopping or I thought I was. But what they don't tell you in the instructions is that anytime you use a new implement that involves food, the parts that will be contact with food, have to be washed first. So, next it meant disassembling the chopper and the chopper blade, no easy task. Washing the blade block is hard because of the sharp blades. The instructions say to dry it after washing it but unless it is air dried, there is no way you can get it dry using a towel. Then, it has to be re-assembled.Once re-assembled, alas, you can start chopping. The literature shows putting a full head of lettuce in which I did. Press the handle down real hard and nothing happened. So split the lettuce head into two halves. Pressed down hard and nothing happened. Like trying to chop a rock. So now I slammed the chopper head down as hard as I could. It just dented the lettuce. Did the same thing with a head of cabbage which the Amazon site said it could. Same results except when I slammed the chopper head down, it cut a quarter of an inch into the cabbage, but I could not get the cabbage of the Blade Block. I had to remove the Blade Block with the cabbage and take a punch and hammer to get the cabbage half off the Block.It did chop celery stalks, carrots and zucchini but I didn't buy the machine for that so I am returning it but it is one difficult piece to disassemble and repack for return and Amazon charges for UPS pickup.

What I liked - I was able to use the vegetable chopper to prepare almost a week's worth of salad for the family in a very short time. I filled two 1-gal tubs with a mixture of lettuce both romaine and iceberg, red onions, tomatoes, mini sweet peppers and cucumber etc. The cut of the tomatoes were shaped different from the usual slicing method but it made the salad interesting and the tomatoes remained sturdy after the chop. I stored them separately. I did not store then with the other chopper vegetables. I cut seeds out of the sweet peppers and laid them flat to get more pieces from each sweet pepper. The sweet pepper pieces were a bit larger than I preferred however the salad was more flavorful.What I did not like - The vegetable chopper did not come with any instructions. We had to use the picture on Amazon to figure out how to assemble it. This took us quite some time. The little tool that came in the box does not do a good job in turning the screws to put on the legs. We had to go find our own 1/2 inch wrench to turn the screw for the legs. The handle comes secured with a little pin that had to be removed an placed in a different position. This was a challenge to figure out and then it was really hard to remove the little pin it and place it in the right position. The pin is too small and hard to move. Again using the picture to figure out how to install. Fortunately a member of my household has good mechanical skills. The chopping blade is very sharp and it cut me on my fingers a few times enough to cause bleeding. It really needs a safety cover that goes over it when not in use and when removing it for cleaning. We accidentally figured out how to remove the blade and put it back in position and secure it. For safety reasons, When I'm not using the machine I remove the blade, wash it leave it to dry in an open container and then store it in a closed container to prevent any accidents. The pressing piece on the handle that presses the vegetable into the chopper cannot be removed to clean it. I have to almost put the entire machine in the sink sideways to clean the top.Even with all the initial struggles to get the vegetable shopper setup and learning how to use the machine, I still like using it because it allows me to spend less time preparing a large amount of salad that we can use over 3-4 days. I will post pictures later if I still have access to this review