Kenwood Chef and Major AT312 Citrus Press Attachment, 600ml

There isnt a huge amount you can say about a citrus press, but as there wasnt a review already I thought I would write a few lines to help with your purchase.

This is a well built attachment that sits on the fast speed outlet. The bowl and juicing cone are plastic and the inlay is metal. This has been able to juice all citrus fruits I have tried from a lime to a grapefruit and the results have been very impressive.

I use mine on speed 3 as I find it hard to squeeze the fruit and I find this is powerful enough to extract the maximum amount of juice possible. The strainer stops any pips and lumps so you just end up with pure juice. An average orange has given me about 40ml to 50ml so you will need quite a few oranges to fill a glass!

Its simple to clean, but is quite bulky to store. This is one of the cheaper attachments for the Kenwood and I am very pleased with my purchase.

What a fantastic citrus press! So easy to press the oranges and lemons... And good capacity too (600ml).

Let me start by saying I am a professional chef with over 10 years of experience. I know my kitchen appliances intimately, I am very conscientious about reading instructions and using every machine exactly as detailed by the manufacturer.

I was really excited to receive my Kenwood KM010 and various attachments, including this citrus juicer. My overall impression upon unpacking all of the attachments was that the quality of the materials in general was not very good. You can see immediately that there is a lot of rigid brittle plastic in this machine and in the accessories, even in pieces that receive a significant amount of stress when in operation. I will write separate reviews for all of the attachments I have used, but the citrus juicer in particular made a better impression than some of the others for its seemingly simple and straight-forward design. Nevertheless, with this somewhat negative first impression, I resolved to handle my chef and its attachments with the utmost care. And the first several uses were completely satisfactory.

Then I realized there is an important design flaw in the locking mechanism of the juicer: when you put downward pressure on the juicer in operation, the resistance causes the base to spin out of the locked position. This happened more and more easily each time I used the juicer, finally becoming much more than a minor annoyance, as I was forced to turn off the machine every five seconds to relock the base. And things went from bad to worse when it stopped functioning altogether.

Which is when I discovered that the attachments for my Kenwood CHEF come with no guarantee/warranty whatsoever. Amazon gives you a return period, but once that period expires, you have no option but to buy a new attachment. I used my juicer for one month, less than twenty times. Now it goes straight to the landfill. Kenwood / Delonghi (the parent company) will sell you a replacement but generally at a price that is higher than what you can find on Amazon and in general they aren't nearly as efficient (I was told I'd have to wait 15 days before I could pick up the replacement at the service centre nearest my house, a 2 hour return trip for me).

Now here's the bad news. I opened the base to see what had happened inside my juicer (which the haughty service technician informed me would void the non-existent warranty leaving me with a net balance of significantly less than zero). Inside the base are various gears which appear to be of fairly solid material and build quality. But there is a very frail plastic bracket which holds the first gear in place. If/when this pathetic spindly brittle piece of plastic develops the most minimum crack, you will immediately notice a loss of power which quickly worsens until it ceases to function completely. When I showed the insides of the mechanism to a friend and mechanical engineer, he said simply with a shrug 'this machine is designed to fail.' When you consider I spent over half a months salary on this machine and it's attachments, you won't be surprised when I tell you that there was suddenly ice running through my veins.

And so now I have a new hobby, which is spreading my message in every internet-retailer and forum in as many different languages as possible. Kenwood, now owned by De'Longhi, has joined the ranks of corporate pirates who not only have shipped our jobs overseas, but have also sacrificed build and material quality in their never-ending and relentless pursuit of the ideal: MONEY FOR NOTHING FOREVER. Definitively, this is not your grandmother's Kenwood Chef.

As soon as I have time, I'll be making videos too so everyone can see exactly how bad this kit is on the inside without having to void their non-existent warranties.