May 9, 2009
Skaffa Review
IKEA is known for providing affordable design to the masses. Or is that Target? In any case, IKEA appears to be proud of the design that goes its products. Walk into any IKEA and there on the wall you will find enormous portraits of the bespectacled, sweater-clad Swedes responsible for the sleek couches, bookcases, tables, desks, chairs, lighting fixtures, colanders, and egg timers found in each warehouse-store. If the photographs could speak they might say, "That $15 Lerberg shelving unit that you are seeing there? Yes, I produced that in in my office one frigid, overcast day in December over a large glass of Julmust."
This emphasis on design makes it all the more difficult to understand the shoddy performance of my Skaffa vacuum flask, purchased some months ago (for a very reasonable sum). As I see it, a vessel such as this should, at a minimum, fulfill the following functional requirements:
- Keep coffee hot
- Reliably decant coffee into cup
The Skaffa succeeds admirably in the former case, but fails miserably in the latter. The first and second cups pour elegantly from the spout in a compact, reliable stream. But beyond that, getting coffee in your mug, and not on your newspaper, is remarkably challenging. It is as if one has purchased a gag item from a novelty store. "Watch their faces as the coffee splatters unpredictably in all directions!"
As best I can tell, there is a critical parameter involving the angle of inclination needed for the liquid to reach the spout. Beyond that angle the fluid overshoots the spout, hits the bottom of the screw-on cap, and then leaves the Skaffa in what can only be described as a stochastic process. The defect may be intimately related to the shape of the curve forming the inner profile of the thermos, but that is a guess.
If anyone can recommend a better product, available in the United States, I would be most grateful.
Posted by cradle at May 9, 2009 4:14 PMyou arent gonna write a letter to them?
what happened to you?!
Posted by: kan at May 9, 2009 5:05 PMThis is extra funny because last week I attended a Writing Effective Requirements class in which a primary example exercise was that we had to write requirements for a "hot beverage container". We did not, as a note, include pourability.
Posted by: Anonymous at May 11, 2009 10:39 AMYour recaptcha thingy gives maddeningly unreadable words. And it didn't tell me if my comment was being moderated or what! It just disappeared!
"This is extra funny because last week I attended a Writing Effective Requirements class in which a primary example exercise was that we had to write requirements for a "hot beverage container". We did not, as a note, include pourability."
Posted by: Kim at May 11, 2009 10:41 AMIt shouldn't just disappear like that, but you can click the tiny recycle icon (above the speaker icon) to load a new pair of images if you don't like what you get the first time.
Posted by: David at May 18, 2009 10:18 PM