Lucy Slicer

This is made by the LUCY company which is a home-grown outfit based in Czechoslovakia, where their approach to health and safety is not quite the same as the UK.

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Their slicer is basically a viciously sharp, exposed blade attached to a guillotine-type thing, with a moveable deck underneath When your cane is in the right position, you push the blade down, peeling away a slice.

 

As an instrument of torture it would give James Bond nightmares…. however, it really is an amazingly effective piece of kit for anyone who makes canes and wants to create smooth, identical slices.

 

You simply place your clay block or cane on the deck and turn a screw handle to slide it slowly under the blade. Push the guillotine down to slice cleanly through the cane. Lift the blade out of the way, and repeat with the same number of turns each time, and you’ll end up with a set of neat beautiful smooth slices of almost identical thickness.

 

I absolutely love mine, despite having sliced through my thumbnail a few months ago. Somehow a Lucy slicer doesn’t look right until it’s got blood on it. It needs to be treated with respect. But it makes creating level sets of identical veneers incredibly easy.

 

You do need A) to build a little 'bumper' of clay to keep your canes in the right position, as the blade doesn't go all the way back to the back of the deck. And B) your canes will slice better and squish out of shape less if you let them rest a bit before slicing.

 

Lastly, the instructions for putting it together (it comes flat packed) are pretty sketchy. And the company as a whole don't seem to worry too much about the way they translate things into English. So you may feel a bit like you're on the Krypton Factor when it first arrives.

 

It's worth it in the end, though, I promise.

 

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