Winco 8" Heavy Duty Chinese Cleaver with Wooden Handle, 3-1/2″

Came sharp. The tang and wooden handle is nicely flush. No snagging on poor construction. The best part? It’s nearly half the price of my local Restaurant Depot.

I am a vegan. I use this Winco cleaver to peel and cut through hard winter squashes with ease. I also use a $10 Kiwi cleaver to cut through hard winter squashes. Honestly I use both because one does better at peeling hard outer shells of the squash and one cuts through the butternut squash like hot butter! Cooks Illustrated recommended this knife and others. This was very affordable. I sharpened The Winco cleaver and my $10 Kiwi cleaver in my automatic knife sharpener which changed the angle to a sharp 15 degree angle and now they both perform wonderfully for breaking down hard winter squash. I do use both cleavers because one peels better and one cuts through the hard squashes with more ease than the other. I would not use the Kiwi cleaver knife without sharpening the angle down to 15 degrees in my electronic knife sharpener. The take home message is this $10 Winco cleaver worked great out of the box and it worked even better after getting a sharper angle. Cleaver knifes are necessary. They make cutting through butternut squash as easy as slicing through butter. I use 2 cleavers when I breakdown squashes. They are a vegan girls best friend! I do have a $90 Japanese MAC vegetable cleaver that is hands down the sharpest knife I have ever owned and I love it and reach for it to do all my veg prep except for hard winter squashes.

(December 1, 2011: I just recently added a photo to the Amazon description page.)This product -- Heavy Duty Meat Cleaver - 8" Blade -- is labeled as model "KC-301" below the name "Winco." A sticker says it's made in China.There are pluses and minuses to this meat cleaver.On the plus side, when new the blade is deadly sharp. It literally cuts paper in a stroke. It has no trouble slicing into a tomato. That won't last long, of course, after several minutes of whacking into Beaver pelts and June bugs and Wallaby carcasses and then afterWard often whamping into the presumably hard surface beneath. But it is unreasonable to expect any blade to stand up to such a beating and stay sharp enough to slice a tomato. When it gets too dull you can sharpen it, which means regrinding, and until then you can hone it every so often, which means using a butcher's steel to realign the very edge of the edge.Here, in case you believe it, is what the Wikipedia article says: "A knife-sharp edge on a [meat] cleaver is undesirable because it would quickly become more blunt than it if were less sharp but sturdier to begin with. The grind of Eastern Asian kitchen knives is 15-18 degrees, and for most Western kitchen knives it is 20-22°. But for a meat cleaver it is even blunter, more like 25°."Also on the plus side, this meat cleaver weighs 15-7/8 ounces, which I'd pretty much call one pound, which is heavy, which is just what I wanted for hacking through bones. Also also, if you don't own a meat tenderizer you can flip this cleaver over and beat your meat with the totally blunt far upper corner (which you can do with any other cleaver for that matter).That said, this is by no means a high-quality meat cleaver.One defect, at least on my exact one, is that at least two of the three rivets are a bit loose. When you hold it by the handle in the usual way and waggle it, you can feel the tang of the blade swing back and forth a tiny bit inside the two grips.Which leads to my second complaint, which is that there's room between the grips and the tang for food and bacteria and molds and viruses and other ick to slip into and propagate and later end up in your turkey stock or your acorn squash ice cream. (This would be true even if the rivets weren't loose.) Any such crud that gets in there is going to be impossible to scrub away. The only solution (ha) I've thought of is to swoosh the handle around vigorously in a solution of vinegar and water, or maybe even bleach and water, and then pray (ha ha).There's a total of about 22 inches of linear space where such crud can get into (and, more importantly, out of) the grip. This is simply a design defect, unless it's a gross manufacturing defect. Either way, for this I subtract 1 star.My third complaint is about the grind. You would expect the top of the grind line of a high-quality cleaver to exactly parallel the sharp edge, but it doesn't. And in two places you can see where there's a third grind line, which is indisputably a mistake. Either this was sharpened on a machine that was adjusted wrong or, much more likely, it was sharpened by a human that was careless.Because of the cross-contamination problem I rate this product at 4 stars. If it cost $30 or more I'd rate it at 2 stars, but it's only 15 bucks.So you can buy two.P.S. Did anyone get the Beaver, June bug, Wallaby, afterWard joke?

This Chinese cleaver is SHARP. I have several new expensive chef's knives, this one, by far, is the sharpest-- which I didn't expect. It has a good weight, a heft to it when you swing it. It is not a lightweight, it's a chopper, and that's what I want in a cleaver. I'm a man, and it fits well in my hand. It has a full tang the whole length of the knife with three steel rivets holding it all together. Wooden handle. The knife edge is as sharp as a RAZOR--no kidding!! I managed to cut myself just washing the knife, the edge just barely touched my finger too, I tried to be very careful but still touched the blade enough to draw a little blood. NOT a beginners knife. Awesome butcher cleaver, awesome price,... great value for the money.

For the longest time I was using kitchen shears to cut apart chicken because I was holding out to get that $100+ cleaver that was listed as a top choice from america's test kitchen but in the end I could not justify that price for how few times I will use it. And the scissor method was not going to cut it (Pun intended) This was 9 bucks and I chopped up my chicken in no time! I only needed a cleaver for making stocks so this is perfect. It's heavy enough to get the job done but not overly heavy. It came already sharpened and was quite sharp. I have made 6 batches of stock since I have had it which is about 24 pounds of chicken leg quarters. I chop them up to about 2 inch pieces so it's a lot of chopping. The edge is still in good shape. No chips. I could use a sharpening now and I use the Chef's Choice 320 Diamond Hone Knife Sharpener, White and it works well. I would also suggest some goggles like the Onion Goggles - Onion Goggles Tortoise Pro Frame they are made for onions but work great for chopping. These are a necessity when chopping leg quarters. There are small shards of bone that fly about when chopping legs. I have actually had a piece of bone stick into my cheek and ever since have worn these goggles.

I gave this as a gift to a couple who are avid carnivorous BBQers & they love this knife. It cuts well, is easy to use, balanced, with a comfortable grip.