How do you smoke your flake?

How do you prepare your flake tobaccos for smoking?

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

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.

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.

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' :p :p :p As if that makes a damn bit of difference :D

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Stuff em most everything else

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I can't seem to get fold and stuff to work for me. I usually rub it out but would love to get the fold and stuff to work.