Cuisinart CEK-40 Electric Knife

The Cuisinart CEK-40 Electric Knife is by far the best ever, and I've used three other brands. The knife and blades store securely in the very attractive tray and the attached cord tucks away neatly behind the stand. I especially like the bread knife which works wonderfully on crusty breads. The blades slip easily into the knife handle and are just as easily removed. This is definitely a quality product and well worth the price.

I am very disappointed with this product. I was carving my Thanksgiving turkey yesterday when the knife stopped working after it got hooked on bone in the wing. The motor continued to work, but the blades stopped moving. The knife has only been used 3 times, but I had to throw it out today. I opened the plastic case, and found a metal worm gear coming off the motor shaft,and a cheap nylon gear attached to it to move the blades back and forth. The nylon gear was stripped and the knife was useless. My prior knife, much less expensive, lasted for 18 years. The Cuisinart knife is not well made and only works well when it is not under any stress.

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I bought this knife and wanted to use it to carve up a roasted pig for a luau party I was having. The knife was a little under powered, it seemed to struggle when cutting larger slices. The pig was quite large (60 lbs) and after about 20 minutes of continuous use the knife became quite warm and stopped working. After a few choice explectives I handed it to my husband. Lucky for me my husband is a mechanical engineer who owns his own business which includes a metal working machine shop. Later that week he took it apart and discovered that there is a very fragile plastic Nylon gear that is part of the main drive. The plastic teeth on the gear were stripped and that is why the knife stopped working. He told me he did a few quick gear calculations (he is a smart fellow) and determined that the plastic nylon gear teeth strength was way underpowered for the design. He was able to make a duplicate gear out of stainless steel in his machine shop and assembled the new metal gear into the knife replacing the junk plastic one. Since that time the knife has worked flawless. I have since carved all sorts of roasts, pork, turkeys and no matter how long or hard the carving is, even if I hit a bone, it never stopped working. The Cuisinart engineers should be embarrased, this is such an easy fix to make (all they need to do is change out the Plastic nylon gear for a metal one, maybe cost them an extra 10 cents?), it is like they never did any research and developement on this product because I know if they tried to cut anything other then bread the dam knife would stop working after about 10 minutes of use. I would say that all the good reviews here are from people slicing bread, if you want to slice meat and use the knife for more then 10 minutes you will need to find an engineer and a machine shop to replace the plastic gear, after that it works great.

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I bought this knife in November after reading the reviews here. I feed my large breed dog a "raw meaty bone" diet and wanted a reliable knife to cut pork shoulders and other large pieces of meat. This knife exceeded my expectations. Worked so great on the Thanksgiving turkey (not for the dog), that I bought three more as Christmas gifts.

It does make a peculiar burning smell for the first hour or so of use, and my wooden knife holder was thrown out after the third use. It rests in the drawer just fine with the other larger utensils.

I highly recommend this knife.

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First of all, this knife is underpowered. It bogs down easily and the blades feel reluctant to slice into anything. But there is also a fatal design flaw. The internal mechanism of this knife uses a stainless steel worm gear to drive a nylon circular gear which in turn drives the blades. The second time I used the knife (on Thanksgiving) the blades siezed up on a piece of turkey bone. The nylon gear ceased turning because of that but the worm gear continued to spin. I took it apart to see why the knife blades no longer moved even though the motor whirred away. Result? The nylon gear is stripped and the knife is irreparably dead. It isn't that hard to design a mechanism with a safety cutout to separate the gears if one stops rotating (or alternatively, to build both gears out of stainless steel) and given the fact that this is by far the most expensive electric knife there is, Cuisinart certainly should have been able to do so. A knife that disintegrates as soon as it hits something tough is worthless junk. This one cost me $25 per cut.

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