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 thick
Scott carr 
