Elite Gourmet Old Fashioned 6 Quart Vintage Appalachian Wood Bucket Electric Ice Cream Maker Machine, *Bonus Classic Die-Cast Hand Crank for Churning, Uses Ice and Rock Salt Churns Ice Cream in Minute

Easy to fill and assemble. The electric motor does a great job of freezing the ice cream in about 45 minutes. Now, it isn't quiet, but it IS a motor, right? The motor unit goes on easily. After freezing with the electric unit, I put on the hand crank. Froze so completely with the electric unit, I could not turn the hand crank. After removing the motor, I easily pulled out the dasher and put on the lid with the handy topper then covered in ice in salt and a towel for about 2 hours. Best freeze I've ever gotten on an electric unit.Now warnings: This unit too 20 pounds of bought ice and about 1/2 box of rock salt. With all that plus the ice cream plus the unit itself, it weighed about 35-40 pounds. I had to have help lifting it off the counter to carry it to the event.

Made a simple vanilla batch today. While reading the recipe I noticed the ingredients would no way test the capacity of the mixing cylinder. So I doubled it and proceeded. Maybe filled it half way. But I wanted to get an ice cream maker that would make enough to last a while. Dessert for breakfast and lunch deserve a try right? Easy to clean up. The electric motor fit well and sounded strong enough. I didn't run it until it stopped on its own. I guessed a little earlier than the instructions suggested and employed the old hand crank. The hand crank goes on the opposite way than I first tried. I thought there was going to be a problem. I must have overlooked that part of the instruction. Maybe explaining it would be confusing. Suffice it to say when you attempt to place the hand on the wooden tub, it only goes on one way. The tub was easy to clean. I rinsed it quite thoroughly. I did fill it with water two hours before my ice cream making process per the instructions so the water would get the wooden tub's material to expand. It still leaked a bit at the base inside the space that is out of site. But it was maybe a half cup of salted water. I expect this leaking issue will decrease or go away all together after a few more uses. Little assembly necessary. Just a Phillips screw drive for the screw in the hand crank handle. I tightened the screws for the hardware that holds the hand crank/electric crank since the screw driver was at the ready. After this first use I can say so far so good. I am happy with the complete product.

Flimsy and poor construction from China. We received defective product like many. Got replacement.update Feb 2024:I used it twice now. 1st attempt it didn't churn well and ice-cream was bit runny.2nd time we let the motor run without disturbing the ice. We kept adding ice and salt spreading evenly from top and got very thick consistency for mango ice-cream. The motor does a good job and took around ~45mins.No need to hand crank. The ice-cream container is very thin and gets dent when forced with hand crank.

This is an amazing ice-cream maker. Im now working on the 4th batch batch for my husband. Fresh made is always better than store bought!

There is nothing like making your own homemade icecream! The recipes are awesome and simple! Yummy!

I don't normally take time to write reviews, but this was bad enough that I wanted to spare others the misery of buying a piece of trash. I didn't use my choice words to describe this product for fear of censorship...I bought this as a family Easter gift and right out of the box I was disappointed with the quality; a surprising amount of cheap and brittle plastic in the hand crank, the churning rod, and the motor. Additionally, the metal bands that encircle the outside of the bucket were much too large, meaning that they were for a bucket whose circumference was larger than this one resulting in the bands not being flush against the wood making them integrally useless; I guess they are for looks, but they look ugly as they make it look cheap. I had the faint suspicion that perhaps the wood might expand when wet and thus necessitate their being oversized, but this was not the case; just ugly and too big. Now to the functionality...I'll begin saying I used this once and was scrupulous in adhering to the exact manufacturer instructions and it broke in multiple ways. The product description craftily tells you that the motor will automatically shut off when the thickness of the ice cream creates the necessary resistance; what high quality!...not. There is no sort of clutch in the motor or any design qualities for this purpose, it's just code speech for "when the ice cream gets too thick that the motor overheats, it burns out and can't run anymore!" I'm not kidding, this is actually how it's designed and if you detach the motor component after it burns out with it still plugged in, you'll find that it will not operate after you've made a batch of ice cream until it cools off because what made it shut off was it being overheated; this is an unquestionable recipe for a destroyed motor if used repeatedly in this fashion, which means longevity is out of the question.Let me continue in saying that when the motor did quit on me, the ice cream was NOT at the proper consistency (I'm saying this knowing that the manual says it should be soft serve consistency; it wasn't...more like slushy soup), so I pulled out the hand crank thinking that I could manually finish it. As I cranked for several minutes, it was thickening up more, but the crank's internal plastic components were making a racket (seriously, it was obnoxiously loud and annoying when cranking under resistance that I felt self-conscious that everyone inside eating lunch was annoyed while I was outside on the porch). As I went on, I suspected that the plastic churner was going to brake since it's so flimsy, but to my surprise, it was actually the cast aluminum-alloy handle that snapped off while I was cranking it (I see now that another reviewer has a picture of the exact same thing).Needless to say, at this point I wanted to hurl the thing in the trash can and be done with it, but my frustrations were mildly assuaged when I discovered that at least the handle snapped off right as the ice cream was a little less thick than soft serve consistency, so we were still able to eat it.It actually makes me mad how cheap this product is, I wouldn't "darken the doorstep" of this seller again if they can stomach selling junk like this to unsuspecting customers.

My daughter and husband loves this ice cream maker. It is easy and use and can make a lot. To make a batch of homemade ice cream can be a bit expensive between the ice, rock salt, heavy cream, sugar, flavors but it's still worth it. The best thing about it is the fact that you can make custom ice cream flavors such as lemon and watermelon.

Very nice old fashioned ice cream maker. Larger capacity great for larger parties, easy to use. Bought to replace an old Rival ice cream maker, this one exceeds the older one (20 years old) in every way. The hand crank is a nice option, although will probably be seldom used.