Potato

It took too much force to process a raw potato. But then my potato was not 100% firm. Somebody online said the manual instructs to use only cooked potatoes but that is not so. The manual does not say that. Although it does recommend to mount it vertically on a stud in the wall. Better leverage.

The potato below was cooked in the microwave.

It's like a baked potato except smashed.

All that for just that.

Fail!

I ate half of it. 

Oddly, all these various restaurant style potato slicers are the same with only superficial differences between them. They all use the same goofy cutting plate that attaches with three screws. 

The thing that kills me about this video for another brand is how they try to be so elegant but the models have the same difficulty that I had and they're doing the same things that I did. The end of the video they're slamming it. As I was. The machine needs to be on a wall braced to a wall-joint. That way, the presumably teenage user can jump up and grab the handle and use his/her full weight to jam the potato through a cutting strip that really isn't that sharp.

But then, if you had six sharp ninja knives lined up horizontally and six sharp ninja knives lined up vertically and pushed a potato through the 6X6 ninja knife-grid then that would be fairly hard too. 

Everybody expects it to be a lot easier. 

My parents had one of these but I never I saw anyone use it. I just saw the machine on the table a couple of times. Something my dad picked up at the flea market. I never saw them together but I think my dad wanted it to work but it just wouldn't. This is his sort of thing. He also had a deep frier and he didn't know how to cook. Now that I used one I can see him getting angry with its failure. Everyone wants this to work.

Dad was the type who actually would bolt one to a wall. Either inside the house or out. Odd tasteless household things like this sticking out of a wall didn't bother him one little bit. Garage or basement. My mom had a machine attached to the clothesline pole to crush soda pop cans. That's how I see him doing that with this. He put up that can crusher for her. 

This machine was tested twice. So far, 2 for 0 fail. 

Microwaving the potato first would work for its first fry. The idea of the first fry is to cook the potato. The idea of the second fry is to dehydrate the potato. 

What if I microwaved the potato half way so it has strength to be pushed but weakness to be cut by twelve knives. 

Actually, it's one thin blade woven back and forth across a grid. 

How do they do that? How do the blades cross? Is one row of blades on top of the other?

No.

It's the same thing as a cardboard carton for bottles. The flat surfaces have slices that are half the width of the blade that intersect with slices in opposite blades running the perpendicular direction, slice inserts to slice, so where the blades meet there is nothing, the opposite blade has a cutout, a line, half the width of the blade. It's the weirdest thing, really, because the blade is going along and it gets to the point of intersection, a line, and there is nothing. The intersecting blade is cut out. But only halfway. The other half of the cutout on the same line in the same spot (line) in the original blade. Emptiness stacked on top of emptiness so that blade halves can cross each other where they meet at a line.

I bet.

I haven't actually looked. 

I'll look when I clean it. Potato is stuck between the blades. And on the plate that holds the potato. And on the opposite plate that pushes the potato. It's all messed up with potato guts. It has to be taken apart and scrubbed. It's a major pain in the B, U, Double-T. And the number of fuckheads who think this is a great idea are numerous, judging by the number of brands. But it's not a great idea. 

Compared to something like, say, lasers.

The laser potato cutter. 

Only one laser. It's tiny. It zips back and forth and traces the slices for french fries across a potato  according to its program, and just watching it is fascinating, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, potato lights up with rapidly moving red lines and the potato is sitting there, lights up, and simply collapses into a pile of potato-logs. 

But n-o-o-o-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-o-o-o

I noticed that all blades are the same on the exit side of the square metal frame while some blades are taller than other blades on the entrance side, as if the blade had altered heights as a wave before it was woven into the frame. The potato hits a wall of knives but not all at the same moment. The blades are serrated and the potato facing them is rounded.