***Addendum to review: I just threw this thing away after it leaked a banana ice cream smoothie all over the counter, due to the right-hand screw threads problem I describe in tedious detail below. This is a piece of junk with a serious, fundamental engineering flaw. Don't buy it unless you enjoy cold liquids all over your counter. In industrial civilization, the vast majority of nuts and bolts have what are called right-hand threads. This form of standardization has helped industrial revolutions move forward instead of humankind regressing to hitting something with a rock. There are exceptions to this "rightie tightie" rule that all have to do with torque. The base of this blender, as seen from the top, drives a plastic coupling in a clockwise direction. That means that should there be excessive friction in the blender blade bushing, it will create a counterclockwise angular force in the blade assembly and if that assembly has standard right-hand threads, that force will tend to unscrew the blade assembly from the container it's screwed in to. The engineers at Cuisinart devised a work-around for this since typical motor drives for blenders rotate in that standard, clockwise direction. What they did was to make the blade bases for all of the various containers for this blender tighten to the *left* and loosen to the right. This predictably saw otherwise normal, intelligent people torqueing the bejesus out of the blade bases to the left in desperate attempts to loosen them and ineffectually twisting them to the right in attempt to tighten them. Sigh. Well, it was time for the Marketing Department to come up with a solution. (Ask Boeing sometime what happens when you let Marketing make engineering decisions...) So Cuisinart decided to damn the torpedoes and change the blade bases and containers for their delightful little blender to right-hand threads. That way, all those consumers who had grown up in industrial civilization wouldn't risk traumatic arthritis trying to loosen the blade base on their blender. Now, picture someone who has spent much of their career advising manufacturers how to account for the thermal expansion of exotic alloys when those alloys are being precision machined on numeric controlled 5-axis milling machines taking delivery on their new blender, and who, after reading all the reviews mentioning the left-hand threads on the blade bases is surprised to see that his blender actually has *right* hand threads. Also imagine him thinking to himself, "Hmmmmmm, I wonder who supplied Cuisinart with counterclockwise drive motors so they could make that ECO (engineering change order) in their blade bases..." So, I thought I'd try out my new blender, after a long, hard working day, by making a nice frozen pina colada in the 16 ounce non-insulated cup. Rinse, in goes the crushed ice, in goes the rum, and in goes some pina colada mix and a dash of real vanilla extract. Mmmmmmmmmmmm :) Just screw on the base nice and snug, invert the whole assembly and lock it into the bayonet mount on the base and pulse and blend until it's nice and thick and creamy! Now of course, by adding alcohol and a fluid of fairly high osmotic content to that crushed ice, we're causing considerable freezing point depression of that liquid which gets accelerated by the blending. Talk about surface to volume ratios!!! And imagine the bushing in that blade base...it's brand-new to start with and...it's getting *cold* as in several degrees below freezing. That means it's getting tight which means that a lot of the torque from that motor is trying to unscrew that blade base from the container. Furthermore, our intrepid pina colada bartender might have even gotten a sliver or two if crushed ice trapped between the seal of the blade base and the container meaning that when it interacted with the alcohol and the pina colada mix, it might have melted, loosening the tight seal between the base and the container...hmmmmm. Good thing this wasn't one of the SRBs on the Space Shuttle, aye? All blended, but now what? Why won't the little bayonet mounts on the container let go of the blender base? It's almost as if something had un-screwed and that had the effect of tightening them until they were effectively jammed. Well, one mighty pickle jar twist later, and the container is free of the blender base...*and* the blade base! And now 16 ounces of really frigid, thick, creamy pina colada are all over the place. The blender motor comes on because fluids with high ionic content are pretty good conductors of electricty and this stuff is covering everything. Our intrepid pina colada engineer quickly pulls the plug. The kids ask, "Is daddie praying?" and Mom assures them that he is. Uh huh. One of two things has to happen for this to be a safe, effective little blender. 1) Revert to the left-handed threads that were originally implemented to avoid this kind of thing (at the cost of every human being in industrial civilization having to forcibly engage in totally counter-intuitive behavior every time they loosened or tightened the base on this blender or... 2) Find a supplier of motor bases that can provide counter-clockwise drive motors for this thing. Now that I'm aware of this design, um, peculiarity, I can probably avoid this kind of disaster in the future with this blender. But, this really is a fundamental design flaw. By engineering a blade base that's not positively locked into the blender base by some kind of spline, the engineers at Cuisineart created a system that's torque sense critical. Their first engineering solution, while a total pain in the ass, was the only correct one from an engineering standpoint. Their work-around had one serious flaw. It only addressed half the problem. I'm still debating whether to keep this otherwise delightful little blender, or to send it back. Now that I'm fully aware of this potential trap, I'm pretty confident I can avoid it. But someone at Cuisinart needs to tell Marketing to leave Engineering alone and to let them solve the entire problem, not just half of it.
