Leifheit37300 Automatic Plum Stone Remover

I am making plum wine with plums from my very prolific single tree. I think I have processed about 150 pounds of plums total in the last two weeks and yesterday I processed about 20 pounds with this product. It helped a lot but it's not perfect so I wanted to give a fairly detailed review.Instructions: The instructions are basically terrible and don't really help much. There are just a couple of diagrams but no real explanation or tips to get good operation.Size: I asked a question about size and one reply said one can pit a 4 inch plum. I doubt that. My plums average around 2 inches and the largest ones barely fit into the opening. I wanted to measure the actual opening but can't do that now. Maybe I can add that later as an edit.Operation: For this thing to work, it has to be lined up down the axis of the pit. Obviously, you can't see exactly where the pit is beforehand. What happens is sometimes when you push down the plunger, it hits the pit and won't go through. I guess you could slam down on the plunger and force it. I found that sometimes if you change the position of the plum a little, the plunger would go through. Sometimes, the pit gets broken into pieces but this happens when you use a knife also. Sometimes the plunger goes through but misses the pit. This product does not section the plums. After pitting, I run my plums through a food processor. Before that, I like to cut the plums into quarters and this is a good time to check for the pit. I found that if the pitter missed the pit, it was still much easier to remove by hand than when just using a knife. There is kind of an optimum ripeness. If the plums are too ripe, they get mushed. If they aren't ripe enough, you need more force to get the plunger through. After pushing the plunger down, it is supposed to return up into a protective tube. Fairly often, the blade does not go fully up. This makes the opening smaller for the next plum but because of the angle of the housing, you can't easily see if the blade is fully up without looking from a lower angle. You can manually pull the blade up but sometimes it comes fully out of the housing.Cleaning: The top comes off the base easily. The blade comes out easily. What I had some trouble with was the the flip-flop plastic part that lets you choose the two hole sizes. I guess the smaller hole is for very small plums or maybe cherries. Not sure. This is where the instruction are no help. I think you are supposed to pop it from the bottom.Durability: We'll see. I am not sure how it will hold up if you hit a resistant pit and hit it hard. I already have seen some plastic shavings where blade must be hitting the plastic guide channels inside.Safety: I would say that this product is semi-hazardous. You need to be very careful. I think you have to hold the plum in place with one hand while you push the plunger with the other hand. This puts your holding fingers very close to the plunger. The plunger motion tends to be sudden so if your finger was in the way, you would probably do severe damage. Sure, you can cut yourself with a knife but because the motion is sudden (more like a chop than a slice) I think it is more dangerous.Summary: I think this product is cost effective. I looked pretty hard and didn't see anything that looked better. I just didn't see much in the way of a mid-range (like maybe $100-$200) pitter for plums. So it was either this, a simple knife, or a commercial machine for several thousand dollars. I do have another pitter on order, the hinged "nutcracker" style. Some of those say they are limited to 1.5 inches. We'll see how that one works when it shows up. That brings be make to the title. This pitter is not perfect but it did get through my plums about twice as fast as manually with a knife.

I think the pitter works well BUT received with a crack on the side of the pit catcher. As this is the weakest part of the system I am hoping seller will replace the clear plastic pit catcher.And NO response from seller. so I have a cracked base ...If you are having problems getting the pit through its because the pit is crooked. No help for that but it really doesn't take a hard push to pit the fruit. Highly recommend for Italian prune plums

The plumb pitter was delivered rapidly and was well packaged. Unfortunately that is all that I can say good about this product.The pitter is advertised as capable of pitting large and small plumbs, unfortunately it is only large enough to pit cherries or small plumbs (there are two size options on the pitter, 1 is about 3/4 inch, the other is about 1 1/2 inch). A large plumb will not even fit in the pitting slot.Next, the device is made out of a brittle cheap plastic. I have had the pitter for 5 days and pitted 40-50 pounds of plumbs and the base has already cracked, and the plate has been damaged by the pitting blade deflecting and hitting the plate.The design and engineering on this are perfect, if I had one that was twice the size and made form quality materials, I would be a very satisfied customer. (or perhaps if I had purchased this with the intent of having a cherry pitter).

Very easy to use - got through two trees of plums in a weekend with this. Pretty sturdy. Watch your fingers though obviously.

Solid made product and appears it would work well. You have to really hit the plunger hard to get the blade through the plum and this is hard on the hand. It works a bit better on very ripe fruit, but leaves a good bit of pulp on the pit. Forget trying to push it through a not so ripe piece of fruit.

I got my plums from Sam's Club and they were too big to fit in this item. This was advertised to fit any size plum. ???

This takes 75% of the plum with the pit, wasting so much of the plum. I had to go back and manually scrape off the plums off the seed so it pretty much defeated the purpose of buying it. We used it a lot (as in with over 400 plums) trying to find a way to make it work for us, but it is a piece of junk through and through.