hello welcome once again to stuff and things where I like to discuss stuff and occasionally even things and today marks part 5 of the stuff and things guide to pipe smoking now in previous episodes we covered everything from why you should smoke a pipe selecting your first pipe selecting your first tobacco we got into some of the tools and accessories you're gonna need to smoke a pipe but now we are finally getting to the point of actually filling loading packing the pipe so this is the stuff and things guide to pipe smoking part 5 how to load / fill / pack your pipe now before we get into the actual mechanics of loading your pipe and and packing your pipe down and getting it ready to smoke I thought we might get into some of the theory behind combustion and maybe this will be a little dry maybe it'll be a little scientific not that scientific cuz I'm not a scientist but I think it's actually a benefit to look into what we're actually trying to accomplish when we're loading our pipe to make our pipe smoke well so let's get into that a little bit now here we have the fire triangle and it shows us the three things needed for combustion you need an oxidizing agent in most cases oxygen or the air that we breathe you need a fuel of some sort and you need a heat source now when we're talking about smoking a pipe obviously as I said the oxygen in the combustion Triangle where the fire triangle is going to be the air which you draw into your pipe the fuel will be tobacco and the heat will be whatever you use as a heat source your matches your lighters what-have-you now to properly burn to have proper combustion and to cause the chemical reaction which sustains combustion you need all these things all these three things in the proper ratio you need the proper amount of oxygen you need the fuel and you need the proper amount of heat to little of each of these things or too much of each of these things in the wrong ratio and you will not have proper sustained combustion and that is what we're trying to accomplish by packing our pipes in a correct way I won't say there is an absolutely correct way but there are correct theories in terms of how you pack your pipe so here's my rather crude drawing of a tobacco pipe you can see the cutaway here we have our tobacco chamber you have the draught hole that goes into the tobacco chamber at the bottom of the chamber you have your airway that goes from the tobacco chamber to the tip of the pipe and what we're trying to accomplish as we pack this pipe is to get the proper density the proper consistency of tobacco within the chamber so that when you draw air over the tobacco and apply some sort of heat source you have the right ratio of fuel which would be the tobacco let's pretend this is tobacco you got tobacco in here we're applying fuel to this or we're applying heat to this fuel in the form of a flame and then we're drawing air over this fuel through the pipe now if you have this packed too tightly you don't get enough airflow over this fuel and what happens is that it burns too cool too slowly you don't get proper sustain combustion you're gonna be relighting your pipe over and over and over again and it's gonna be a struggle by the same token if you have things packed too loosely you'll have too much oxygen within the within the combustion chamber as you draw air over it and it will burn too hot it'll burn too quickly it'll be harsh you'll go through the bowl much quicker you could even damage the walls of your pipe and whether or not this illustration was actually helpful at all this is what we're trying to accomplish is the proper density of tobacco within this pipe so that when you draw air over the fuel which is the tobacco and apply the heat you have a perfect combustion that's sustained that's not too hot that's not too cool and you can smoke your bowl all the way down you'll probably have a relight here and there but you shouldn't have to relight it over and over and over again if it's packed correctly so now we get down to the business of actually packing our pipe full of tobacco tobacco I'm going to use for these illustrations is Dunhill's nightcap because it has a very nice fine ribbon cut and it's very easy to pack if you're just starting out with smoking pipes this is a cut which you will not struggle with very much the consistency is very uniform there are a lot of inclusions of Twiggy bits or woody bits it's a nice consistent even fine ribbon cut so it'll make it very easy to try out and when I thought about doing this video there were several different methods that I thought I should show you and I've narrowed it down to three as a new pipe smoker I think these three methods will probably be the most beneficial for you and as you get more experienced smoking a pipe you'll probably sort of modify these and find out things that work best for you but when you're first starting out it is kind of nice to have a rope method that if you follow the steps correctly you can get a pretty satisfying smoke now of course a lot of these things are gonna change based on the consistency of the tobacco you're smoking you might be smoking a flake or a plug or something like that but in general for a ribbon cut like these or like this tobacco that's done hills nightcap this should work so the first method I'm going to show you is the venerable and almost ubiquitous on YouTube three pinch method this is something that it seems a lot of YouTube pipe presenters show as the method for lighting or for packing a pipe it's not the way I started out when I first started smoking a pipe but it's the thing that when I really got into pipe smoking as a hobby it's the one that worked pretty well for me right off the bat and I don't use it all the time now depending on which what kind of tobacco I'm smoking but it works pretty well and I think it's a good way for a new pipe smoker to start out so what you do you get a pinch of tobacco you let it fall into the bowl of your pipe in the chamber just a gravity fill you kind of knock the edge there and you just let it find its own level and you get it so it's right up to the rim as you can see you take your tamper and you very lightly pack down this first pinch you're about halfway and about halfway up the bowl or the chamber then you take another pitch you loosely let it fall into the chamber once again sort of self level you're not pressing in yet you're just letting it kind of find its own finding its own level there and you pack again this time a little more firmly until you're about 2/3 to 3/4 up up into the chamber if you can see that then you take one final pinch and this one I let go over the rim a little bit and this one you're gonna pack a little more firmly so you should end up just a little way below the rim of the bowl you pack it nice and evenly and that's what you end up with and when you draw on it should still feel nice and open it shouldn't feel obstructed now this is something very important it's something that you kind of have to experience for awhile to understand exactly what you're looking for but when you're testing the drop and you should always test the draw as you're packing the pipe especially when you're just starting out you want to feel like you're sucking through a straw like drinking soda through a straw not not drinking a milkshake through a straw let's let's put it that way you shouldn't have to try very hard it should be a fairly effortless sip but you should feel just a little bit of resistance but you don't want to feel like you have to have an aneurysm just to suck air through the end of the stem and this feels perfect so that's the three pinch method and the reason you do it in the three different levels is you're still trying to get this consistency within the bowl and if you do it all you know if you just pack a huge gob of tobacco in there and then smash it down you're not gonna have a very consistent pack and as you burn down through the bowl it's just not gonna burn very well you're gonna have patches that are much more dense than others other areas that are much more loose so this way if you start out loose and then slowly build up you're compressing the tobacco that you put down there to begin with and you're trying to get something that ends up pretty consistent and for the most part it works pretty well you're gonna have a few relights as you smoke down the bowl but I recommend this for people just starting out it is something where you have this specific method that you can follow and if you follow it correctly it should work out for you pretty well so let's empty this bowl and get on to the next method let me before I show you the next method let me just show you what I did when I first started smoking a pipe I would take a hunk of tobacco and I'd shove it in and I'd smash it down with my fingers until the pipe was full and you know it kind of works I think that's that's kind of the old-timer method the method list method of packing a pipe but you won't get a very consistent smoke usually that way and a lot of times it'll burn too hot or too cool but that's what I use for years before I actually start in doing some research on this the next method I just call the light pack method and again you start out just doing a gravity fill let the tobacco find its own level and this is similar to the three pinch and that you're kind of putting in layers but this time you're doing it much lighter you're holding your tamper you're holding it very loosely in your fingers and you're almost just letting the weight of the tamper and just a little bit of pressure from your fingers there can you go again and again the same just very light amount of pressure so you're not compressing it as much on the second pinch as you do with the three pinch method and then again the last time just a tiny tiny bit of pressure and what this does is makes it pretty consistent sometimes with the three pinch method because you're doing it in three different layers and you're doing it with different pressure as you go you can get kind of three distinct layers which makes sense and it might the the characteristics of the combustion can change as you go down through the bowl this works pretty well with like a loose ribbon cut this light pack method that I do with pike with tobacco's like the Frog morton's tobacco's are kind of a coarse cut with all sorts of different inclusions it's kind of Twiggy it's not as fine as this it works pretty well with something like that because you're just very you're lightly packing in a tobacco like frog more and there may be a Mississippi River that's like a crumble cake you can't really pack that tobacco very much anyway it'll just be way too dense so this method you're just sort of letting the tobacco find its own level and you're just lightly tamping it down test the drug in it's good so this works pretty well this is something that maybe if you have a little more experience and you start to understand exactly what consistency you're looking for as you're smoking your pipe and you start to understand the different characteristics of certain tobacco blends it's a way you can use it's kind of a more intuitive method than the three pinch method so I would recommend as a new pipe smoke and you start with the three pinch method and then you can maybe start working into the light Sackman I don't know if that's even a thing it's just what I call it and it's something that I kind of just do but my favorite method and when I use more often than not depending again on the cut of tobacco is called the Frank method now this method was developed by a team Frank a very detail-oriented German gentleman he introduced this at the 2004 Chicagoland pipe show and he developed this method of packing a pipe for competitive pipe smoking which is a way it's basically important for someone to be able to smoke a pipe bowl all the way down without having to have a bunch of relights when you're competitively smoking I'm not exactly sure what competitive smoking is but it necessitates a nice consistent pack where you can smoke the bowl all the way down and have very few relights now this method is interesting I don't do it necessarily exactly the way even Frank recommends doing it I kind of have my own little take on it but I'm gonna show you the pretty much approved Frank method and then if you want to make variations on this as you improve as a pipe smoker then feel free but this starts out the same way as the other two methods I showed you with a loose gravity fill I got a twig take that up loose grab the fill again kind of tap the edge let the pipe find its own level so you've got tobacco filled up to the edge gravity filled then you put a little more and then Hakeem recommends that you get a packet of tobacco you use these three fingers like this with the claw pinchers and you gather up a packet of tobacco and I don't know if I have enough to loose tobacco here to do this I might want to grab it out of the jar makes it a little easier so I'm just gonna grab a packet of tobacco with these three fingers now you want it to be more broad here than you do up here so you've got a broad packet of tobacco you hold your pipe here that you've gravity filled you put this to this packet here and you take this thumb and you hold the packet over the pipe now it should be about the diameter or the the diameter of your pipe bowl so if you have a lot of other things kind of hanging out the side you can grab some of those and take them off and then what you do you take your other thumb and you start working your way around the bowl with your thumbs you can see the you're not pushing into the bowl with your thumb you're using the pad of your thumb and kind of rolling on the tobacco sort of flattening it out but you're not shoving it down into the bowl you're just doing a rolling motion with your thumbs to make a flat plug of tobacco that goes into the bowl not a lot of pressure barely light and you're rolling around the rim you're not shoving your thumb into the rim you just keep working your way around the bowl until you end up with a nice flat part on top sometimes if there's any extra you can yank that out now on all these other methods we're using you would tamp the tobacco into the pipe you don't want to do that with the Frank method because you'll ruin the perfect consistent consistency that you've created throughout the bowl you'll pay you'll pack down this top part you'll have this very dense little saucer tobacco at the top and then everything else will be different so what this method does is basically makes it so you have very few relights and the bowl seems to smoke down very consistently and very nicely eventually as you get about halfway down you will have to tamp and you'll notice if you do the method correctly when you can't you just have this fluff of ashes that your tamper just kind of falls through but this method or a kind of variation of this method is probably my favorite it's not one that I would start out with right off the bat and necessarily if you want to play around with it you can but you sort of have to understand the characteristics of the tobacco you're smoking the way it burns you have to sort of understand how much tobacco each Bowl you're using can can take testing the draw on this it's perfect but that sort of develops through experience you have to sort of understand the characteristics of whatever pipe you're using and whatever tobacco you're using this tobacco does Dunhill works really well with the Frank method because when you make your packet with your three fingers it sticks together pretty well and it's easy to put it on top and then grab grab it with your thumb other cuts don't work as well and so you'll have smaller packets because it won't stick together and you have to sort of understand okay how much how much tobacco can this pipe take so you you you have to sort of develop a an intuitive knowledge of your tobacco and your pipe I have gotten to the point where I use the Frank method most of the time and maybe with slight little variations I don't often pack all the way up to the rim of my bowl like this because I am a freak about rim darkening and when you're lighting to tobacco this way you'll get more rim darkening just because the tar from the tobacco is actually right up at the rim and it can start getting on there there is a very specific way that Hakeem Frank tells you that you should light your pipe when you use the Frank method he recommends using a torch lighter which you would usually never do when you're when you're lighting a tobacco pipe torch lighter you know it's like this big flame that comes down most people recommend using a soft flame lighter like this butane lighter I have it's a soft flame but he uses a torch lighter but he's very careful to only he goes in vertically onto the bowl and he only does it for a second and the point of that is just to light the entire flat surface of the tobacco packet all at once and he goes through this whole process it's very detailed I mean he is German afterall but if you're not I I would shy away from recommending a beginning pipe smoker using a torch lighter you could easily damage your pipe so with the soft a soft flame lighter like this you can still light this pretty well and we'll get into actually lighting your pipe and smoking your pipe later so I won't go into all the detail about that about you can't really tamp this either when you light it when you use the method but anyway I think that's enough to be going on with for now so there you have it that's three different methods for you to use when you're first starting to smoke your pipe I'd recommend the three pinch method first when you're just starting out it's something that's easy to follow the instructions you'll get a fairly consistent fairly good smoke through using that method and then as you get a little more experienced and you start understanding the ways your tobacco and your pipes react to each other how much you can pack into a particular pipe how a certain tobacco blend behaves then you can start experimenting with some of the other methods and eventually maybe do the Frank method which is probably my favorite method or variations thereof anyway that is all for episode 5 of these stuff and things guide to pipe smoking in episode 6 we're actually gonna light this bad boy up and we'll smoke down a whole bowl and we'll just show you that whole process it's insanely interesting so until then I have Ben Bradlee you've been the audience this has been stuff in things thank you so much for watching I'll see you later