HIC Harold Import iSlice Opener
by HIC Porcelain
Our Price: $1.25
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Category: Kitchen
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Product Summary
Manufacturer: HIC PorcelainBrand: HIC Porcelain
Model: 95142
Color: Blue
Product features:
- Patented iSlice safely clips, cuts, and opens thousands of items
- Zirconium-oxide ceramic blade resists wear and never rusts; stays sharp
- Bright blue housing and silver tip so it?s easy to find
- Ideal for scrapbooking, opening DVDs, clipping recipes, and cutting gift wrap
- Airport safe; measures 2-1/2 by 1 inches
Kitchen and Housewares Reviews of HIC Harold Import iSlice Opener
Customer Review: Everything you need to know about this cool gadget
Summary: 5 Stars
I just got my iSlice yesterday and am already confident this will be a very frequent use item for me. Because I had a little difficulty assessing exactly what this little thing was before I bought it I wanted to write a more comprehensive review of what this thing is and what it can do.
To best understand what it's capable of I will tell you how it works. What you can't see in the picture is a tiny piece of ceramic held in the gray end. Call it a blade, call it a nub, there's not a great word for it but basically it's a pointy bump. The opener is used by gripping (between thumb and forefinger) the blue part and sliding the gray end along what you want to cut with the entire flat bottom edge (gray and blue) flat against the surface to be sliced. As that tiny piece of ceramic, which only protrudes about as much as a layer of cardstock, drags along the surface it slices it very neatly. The amazing bit is that the ceramic really doesn't feel all that sharp. You can even feel it with your finger without fear of cutting skin.
There are a lot of reasons this design / material choice is very elegant.
If you're familiar with ceramic skip this paragraph. If you're not familiar with ceramic blades they offer a lot of advantages over steel. For one they don't rust, and I don't mean they don't rust like stainless steel (which is really just stain resistant steel, to varying degrees) I mean that since rust is formed from iron, an "ingredient" of steel but not present in a piece of ceramic, this thing is no more able to rust than a ceramic coffee mug. Another advantage to ceramic is edge life. All steel, no matter how hard, still has some capacity to be "bent" and that ability to deform means it will eventually lose its edge. Ceramic, by contrast, behaves more like a stone. That doesn't mean it can NEVER lose its edge, but you're not going to find the cutting depth and sharpness of this ceramic nub/slicer suffers from casual use, or accidentally being pressed against a hard surface, the way steel would. The DISadvantage to ceramic is that, being hard and inflexible, it can chip and shatter. This is a huge drawback for a large, thin ceramic kitchen knife, but for the tiny nub of a blade on this thing I don't see this being an issue. So long as you aren't banging it against hard surfaces you'll be fine. Think of it a bit like a dinner plate, although in practice I expect this to hold up better since a dinner plate will shatter under its own weight when dropped but I don't expect this to.
There IS a very small magnet inside the gray part. It is a very weak magnet. You will not be using this to hang a painting on your fridge, but it's more than adequate to hold the opener. This may be a blessing if you would otherwise end up having 8 coupons someone stuck to the fridge with this fall on the floor every time you wanted to quickly grab this, not that that's what happens with our magnetic bottle opener.... ;)
Finally, the $64,000 issue: What can this thing cut? In terms of material hardness, the ceramic blade will easily slice through blister pack plastic, so don't worry about what it's capable of material wise. What you need to be aware of instead is how DEEP you want to cut, and that's where this thing really starts to seem magical, at least for "thin" jobs.
If you want to clip coupons, cut out pictures, packing tape, maybe UPC / "box-tops" or anything else that's on a paper-thick layer, then use light pressure and trace the edges of what you want to remove. More pressure will work but you are liable to cut what's underneath as well. With light pressure you can actually cut out a coupon, picture, or recipe from a magazine without affecting the page beneath it.
With firm to heavy pressure it will neatly cut open plastic packaging, even the stuff that's about as thick as a business card. Just run a couple cuts down each long side and a cut across the short side at the top or bottom that overlaps the side cuts and the new "flap" will open like a box lid without you having to touch those frustratingly tough edges. The firmer requisite pressure is not because plastic packaging is hard to cut, the ceramic slicer is doing all that work. The firmer pressure is because it's thicker and you need a deeper cut. My slicer arrived in the same box as a nylabone in molded plastic so of course I immediately tried it on that and was even able to cut the molded plastic. It may be designed to be used against a flat piece of material but it is not too difficult to cut molded plastic. Just try and hold it so the blue "handle" is over a convex part of the shape as much as possible, and cut from the center toward the each edge of any indentations, not straight across.
At either end of the thickness spectrum just remember to slide the slicer with the flat edge against what is being cut. When you first use it your tendency will probably be to hold it at an angle as if the gray plastic is a knife blade. Remember that ceramic nub on the bottom edge does the cutting, and by varying the pressure you control the depth of the cut. I should also mention that if you ONLY want to make very shallow cuts for pictures, recipes, etc, say you're looking for a scrapbooking gadget and don't need something to deal with packaging, you may be better off with the Slice Safety Cutter, Green that has a shallower blade.
So what can't this thing do? Cut anything deeper than one or two layers of cardstock. The ceramic nub simply doesn't extend that far. If you want to cut something thicker, such as corrugated cardboard, this is not the right tool for the job. That doesn't mean this can't help open any boxes, as many are secured with very thin tape, but just be aware this NOT a replacement for a utility knife.
The iSlice is a new (to me) class of tool, elegant in simplicity, and seems to me to be a simply "correct" design. Leave me a comment if there's anything you wanted to know I *haven't* covered, otherwise I hope this is all the help you need to decide if it's what you're looking for.
Description of HIC Harold Import iSlice Opener
The most useful tool that you?ll ever own. Safely clip, cut and open thousands of items. The ergonomically-shaped islice features a built-in magnet and recessed high-tech zirconium-oxide ceramic blade that resists wear and never rusts or dulls.Can Openers
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