How do you smoke your flake?

[Haebar]

How do you prepare your flake tobaccos for smoking?

Do you rub it out, fold and stuff, or somewhere in between?

[Aguineapig]

fully rubbing it out is pretty reliable, so when I don't feel like experimenting and learning more about how to smoke flake, I'll do that. Other times I will cube cut it, fold and stuff, and also musketball method which I've probably had the most luck with. My MM Country gent has a slight conical shape to bowl, especially since it's more caked towards the heel (I smoke lot of half bowls), so wadding up a single flake and stuff it in the top leaves a generous air pocket in the bottom half of the bowl. Works good for wetter flakes as well, since it keeps the last bit of tobacco from getting quite so soggy.

[Pipe Smoker]

I always cut my flakes into squares. About 3/16" on a side.

Edit: My tobacco knife is a small 5" santoku that I bought at my grocery store for $6. It has a slight, constant-curve convex edge. Also came with a plastic sheath. It's the best tobacco knife that I've ever found. I use it against a small bamboo cutting board, dedicated to tobacco.

[Emperor Zurg]

I tend to leave it in flake form but there's several exceptions;
If it's STRONG and full flavored, like 1792 or G&H Dark Flake, I leave it as intact as possible
If it's a mild flavored blend like G&H Glengarry, or Newminster 400, I'll usually rub it out - unless I'm primarily looking for a good long smoke (read: road trip) then I'll leave those intact too.
If a blend is in the medium department, flavor-wise I'll usually do a very coarse rub out - more like a 'crunch out' actually - to where I just smash up a bowl's worth of flake between my fingers so that it ends up mostly (60 to 75 percent) bigger chunks with a fair amount of shreds.
Some I like to cube cut; this is for when I just feel like cube cutting something or when I have a block of several sticky flakes that seem to be welded together. Instead of trying to separate them without shredding them, I'll cube cut a bowl's worth off the end.

Look at all the fun cigar guys miss out on. Their discussions are limited to 'do you prefer a punch or a v-cut' As if that makes a damn bit of difference

[Lostmason]

I've been rubbing my flake simply cause I suck at fold and stuff. But, having recently acquired a decent knife
I will be trying the cube cut method.

[Haebar]

I rub out my flakes unless I'm in a hurry or I don't have a little bowl or something to catch the rubbings. In those cases, I'll roll the flake into little balls and place them in the bowl. Back when I was a teenager, there weren't many places to learn about flakes and how to smoke them, so I was always puzzled. I had the stuff part of it down but didn't know how to fold it. I didn't realize you could rub out the flake and then smoke it.

[BryGuySC]

I always have burn issues with fold and stuff.
Sometimes, I cube cut, but I don't like how it has the ability to spill out.
I tend to roll the flake into a ball, and stack two of the rolled balls on top of each other to fill the chamber. I sprinkle the leftover bits on the top. This tends to be pretty reliable, for me.

[Bruck]

Thin flakes I'll fold and stuff, but mostly I smoke my own flakes which I can never cut thin enough for this operation, therefore I rub them out.

[Cool Breeze]

I like to keep a flake as in tact as possible. I use a version of the fold and stuff method. A guy at my local shop showed me how he does it and I love the method. I tear or cut the flakes longways about 4 times and then fold and stuff those slimmer pieces. When the bowl is nearly full, I rub some out fully to put on top to get it going.

It works great. If anyone is interested, I demonstrate the method I use in a YouTube video. The link to my channel is in my sig line.

There are a couple of tobaccos that I use a slightly different method on. Dark Star is one. That tobacco is just so thick and moist that it doesn't work all that well. I rub it out a little bit more than my usual, but still not rubbed all the way out. If I'm smoking a flake, I want large in tact chunks of tobacco in my bowl. That's the idea that the blend was designed around.

Just my 0.02

[Branzig]

I like to rub them on out if it's a SG.

Stuff em most everything else

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