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

Sharp enough to make your eyes water and very well balanced, I'm convinced you could split an atom with this cleaver. The fact that its $8 is unbelievable. The excellent nearly chrome finish on the blade is still rust free months of abuse later and its still my weapon of choice when bulk prepping meals or chopping all sorts of meats and veggies.If you've seen the reviews about loose handles...they are true. However, I was pleasantly surprised when the moisture and oil from my hands and also from washing it a few times expanded the wood handle for a perfect fit. Within a few days that shaky handle was no longer an issue. Just use it, or soak it when you first buy it and you wont have any issues.

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?

I enjoyed it... it's very convenient for a family cookout. Thank you very much

This is nice a heavy, you can chop though a chicken or though ribs, no problem, however since I have not had a proper kitchen cleaver in a while, I forgot a few things, which may help you:... remember a few decades ago when all the cutting boards were made of thick wood.... yeah you need one of those. I broke two of those plastic/PVC cutting boards. You forget that if you really slam the cleaver though the meat, you will hit what ever the meat is on, so if you want to wail on it, get a thick wooden board, or just dial your strength back and take two of three lighter swings at the chicken to make it sumit to your quartering.... remember what we did before knifes had a "lifetime blade"?... or perhaps you dont notice that most all knifes have a warenty to keep their sharpness for life? well, this does not. The blade may need sharpening, after all the whacking it will go though, and all the cutting boards you will hit, the blade will dull. re-sharpen it, there are sharpeners on the back of some electric can openers (really, you should look at yours) or they are a few bucks to get a manual one at walmart.I do not use this every day, maybe once a month, I have had it for a few months, no rust, no problems (except for the broken cutting boards, which I blame myself), I like it.

used it for chopping meat a lot

Handle is loose. Big gap as shown in the picture. Handle makes clicking noise due to loose handle.