OXO Good Grips® Tabletop Spiralizer

I bought the OXO Good Grips Spiralizer a few months ago from Bed Bath & Beyond. I have used the OXO almost daily and have spiralized sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabaga, daikon radish, both red and green cabbage, turnips and then yes; zucchini. The OXO breezes thru all of them effortlessly. The OXO Spiralizer is solidly built, (it actually has some weight to it), all the parts fit/snap well together. The suction device on the base easily and most securely attaches to my countertop. It is the size of a small toaster (with the rotating handle removed) and easy to store. The blade box comes with three blades and slides off of the base unit leaving a nice low profile and clean look to the OXO. And it's easy to clean as well. The base, the blade and the spiked food holder are an easy rinse in the sink. THE best part of my OXO Spiralizer experience is that I am eating a wider variety of vegetables than I ever have before and I eat them much more often. I have not boiled one pasta noodle since owning a spiralizer. And with all of the recipe ideas available online for spiralized vegetables and fruits it's really fun to try new veggies in new ways. Spiralizing saves me time (I'm not a fast "chopper") I can have a vegetable ready to cook or put in a salad meal in less than15 seconds and then clean up in less than a minute. A few concerns to mention: - There are 3 blades in the OXO model, whereas every other Spiralizer on the market has 4 or more blades. I'm just curious what that 4th blade is and why they chose to omit it? Since I haven't "missed" it, I suppose it doesn't matter. - The cylindrical coring blade could be narrower. I noticed the 'Inspiralizer' has a smaller core blade and it demonstrates just fine. A narrower core blade would mean more of the vegetable would be spiralized and also, one could use narrower vegetables. - Lastly, although there are separators in the blade box for the blades, the blades still touch each other. Each blade should slide down on a track of its own within the box to keep them more separate. The blades bump into and catch onto one another as you take them in and out of the box. It's also a time issue to have to so carefully remove and replace the blades in the blade box when it would be easier to just slide them down a track, just like they slide onto the base for cutting. - The blades are beyond sharp and it only takes one tiny cut to emphasize the need to keep from touching them,, Like a paper cut, the pain just doesn't want to go away. (The blades being sharp is not a negative, I'm just mentioning this so as to be careful) You can stop reading here,, or read on for some personal tips: All of the demo's that tell you to cut both ends of a vegetable off and then discard? Forget-about-it~! Understandably, they want veggies to look "pretty" for the camera but you don't need to do this in real life at home. Yes, there is no need to cut off the stem part of the vegetable. In fact, the teeth of the spiked food holder on the OXO pushes quite easily into the stem of all of the veggies I mentioned above. And why cut off the stem? you "lose" a bit on the spiked end anyway, might as well make it the stem. I also feel the spikes are more secure going into the stem, especially the zucchinis as it's a soft veggie. And you can see by my pictures that the teeth don't have to be pushed all the way into the stem of the veggie, just enough to hold it. The same is true on the other end of the base for the cylindrical coring blade… you only need to cut off the very tip (if anything) of the vegetable. Just push the vegetable into the coring blade and that's it. That's all the OXO needs to hold the vegetable in place. Once you start turning the rotating handle, the vegetable immediately begins to spiralize. You can also see from my pictures that I don't peel the veggies. ..not even beets or sweet potatoes. I did half peel that rutabaga cause it looks a bit gnarly. I just scrub the veggies with a scrubby sponge. The point is, I've seen plenty of demo's where they peel most everything, even mentioning that the peel is more difficult to spiralize. ..not really true.. peeling is time consuming and the OXO cuts thru it all just fine. The peels of veggies are good for you~! think "extra fiber". With cabbage, to avoid "runaway leaves" I move a rubber band down the cabbage as I spiralize. It's easy to stop and start again moving the rubber band along without leaves flying out. And I must say, I could never cut cabbage for cole slaw or stir fry as nicely as the spiralizer does,, and again,, time saved~! Cleanup is super easy, just remove the blade card and rinse it under running water.. if a bit of vege gets stuck in the corner of the blade, I use a toothbrush to sweep it out. The crank handle snaps off, leaving the spiked food holder easy to rinse off as well. To clean the base, just hold the unit upright under running water (to avoid water getting into the suction device). That slit you see on the base where the blade card snaps in has an exit on the bottom of the unit for water to flow thru,, diverting it from the suction device. Nice to see they thought of this. The food stains I noticed when using carrots, sweet potatoes and beets was easily cleaned using dishwashing soap and a sponge. I used a toothbrush on the teeth of the spiked food holder. All cleans up quite nicely.