This topic hasn’t been touched in a while and I was hoping to see if anyone has had success with some of the newer cig filling machines. There are a number of units from China, Korea, & Turkey made for tabacco. Most don’t have established websites and do their marketing on YouTube. I have no doubt they do tobacco well but hemp seems to be trickier because of the stickiness. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
I’ve only used the knock box personally.
Rocketbox and Rocketbox mini is way higher price and faster output.
Thank you. I was more looking for something automated. I know Futurola just started doing cig rolls but I have a hard time believing they can get the compression needed for even distribution with a straight tube.
I have been working really hard on my own hemp cigarettes and the key is the consistency of the product going into the machine. Straight ground flower is too sticky and will clog any machine. I have had really good success with the Powermatic III as long as the product consistency is right.
Thank you for sharing. I’ll DM you.
My old company had one of the Raw automated fillers and the pre rolls always burned evenly. They ground it pretty finely but not a powder. I see more bad machine filled pre rolls than good ones
I’m sure Raw is just branding a pretty simple design at a premium but it worked for what it was supposed to. They just had a person press down the ending to close it off and pop it in a doob tube.
Another dispensary I worked for STILL just has 2 people doing it by hand every day. The two dudes loved doing it and the prerolls burned perfect. They somehow kept the dispensary stocked for rec. Not sure how much you need to scale but my point there is doing them all by hand is doable if you’ve got the right people doing it that actually give a shit
We are looking to do between 8-12K of straight tube hemp cigarettes per day with only 2 people. The vibration plates from Futurola and others work well for pre-rolls but I suspect a straight tube is much different.
That’s a lot of free pre rolls
Why do you say free?
None of the tobacco machines will work with good quality hemp or THC flower. The method that the tobacco machines use is spoon-injection. What that is essentially is the machine compresses the tobacco into a rod and then the spoon injects the rod of tobacco into the empty cigarette tube.
In order to inject the tobacco rod easily into the cigarette tube it has to compressed to a diameter that is smaller than the cigarette tube it is going into. That is fine for tobacco since tobacco is a shredded non-sticky material. So when it is compressed into a tight rod it slowly expands and fills the empty space in the tube.
However when you do that to cannabis the ground sticky particles want to stay compressed in that tight rod and doesn’t expand to fill that empty space. Not to mention overtime resin builds up and start to clog the mechanics of the machines.
People have gotten some of those tobacco machines to work by mixing herbs with the cannabis or grinding the cannabis extremely fine or using trim (even worse some people use extracted material). But that I believe long-term is not the hemp cigarette market will or should be. People want to smoke high-quality hemp flower that looks exactly like what you would grind at home - not full of sticks, stems and whatever else.
There are a few machines that will work to varying degrees of success.
There is the Perfect Pack 180 - this is a pretty basic cheap machine but packs the cigarette and artisan tubes extremely well. The most important part about packing a tube is ensuring that the pack toward the filter is tight and consistent throughout. When you snap the cigarette by the filter you really want to hear a snapping sound. The perfect pack uses a screw-filling system and so really ensures that the cannabis flows right toward the filter end. It named the 180 because we estimated you can do on average 180 an hour per machine/person. You can find that here: Perfect Pack 180 - Cigarette Filling Machine | Custom Cones USA - there is only a short video right now but working on one that shows how this works a little more in-depth.
There is the sluice box - this is basically a vibration based machine pretty similar to the knockbox but the hole diameters on the trays can be customized to the size of a cigarette tube. Filling tubes is obviously harder than filling cones since the top diameter is smaller and there isn’t the geometry of the cone helping you. But it does work there is just a lot of tamping and manual touches afterwards to make sure you have a good of a pack as you get from the perfect pack. There is however the tamping tool attachment for the sluice box which can help you tamp down all your tubes at once. You can find that here: Sluice Box MJ Pre-Roll Machine - Custom Cones USA
8-12K a day with 2 people would require a much more automated machine, higher output machine but these will be much higher priced than the above. Minimum investment you would be looking at is six-figures. If your interested DM
Ezjautoroller - these guys had an impressive machine i saw at the last mjbiz for around $80k
There is also a company out of montreal that has a bigger machine that works great, its cost around $300k
Knock box with dental mold vibrator. If you get creative you can make a large knock box and use a concrete vibrator on a metal plate, Stock with tubes - Pour ground material over and let it rip. Going to be loud AF though.
Thank you for the thorough response. The 180 looks like it would do a excellent job quality wise but is more manual labor than we would like. The Sluice looks very similar to the Futurola knock box but I worry both wouldn’t do good job with a straight tube. Maybe the tamping tool would do the trick. Even knock boxes and having to manually load the tubes would be very laborous. Not sure there is a perfect option unless I want to get into the 300K+ range.
Looks like a nice product but it seems like it is meant for pre-rolls, not straight tubes, unless I missed something.
Do you have experience with a knock box and straight tubes?
Has anyone given these guys machine a shot?
Small business, lifetime warranty, made in cali. 640 cones at a time for 3.5k.
Still has the bottleneck of twisting the tops but I’m sure you could get an insert to tap all of them down
For myself personally I am going to be giving this setup a go for my small white label orders I get for doobs.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FCQRLV3?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07DYMN8RC?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image
I know someone with a cigarette machine a little south of me, he has nothing but problems with it, needs constant repair and the cigs are always packed too tight
Yeah the 180 is definitely going to be more of a manual process but in my opinonno more than the sluice and futurola. the 180 you fill one at a time but you also don’t need to tamp so you save time there.
With the sluice box tamping does help a lot to make sure the material actually packs down and doesn’t just sit there with a bunch of air pockets.
Yes I would say right now unfortunately there isn’t a perfect solution however luckily that also means not a lot of companies are playing in this space so you can really stand out with a cylinder shape pre-roll.
Also in regards to your other question about using a Futurola knockbox and tubes - I have seen it done before and actually I’ve seen it done at a very large scale (500K+ tubes produced per month). You need to use the reefer size attachment as that is the smallest hole size the futurola knockbox offers and the closest size to a cigarette tube. I think it is around a 9.2mm hole opening and cigarettes are 8.1mm in diameter. But its going to be how you imagine - the tubes sort of fill with weed but with a lot of air pockets in the tube. So then an employee has to tamp down the material into the tube and fill the extra space in the tube with more material. It is a manual process but it is possible to do and do at a large scale.
We just purchased one of these for the exact same reason. And we have spoken with the guys over at Custom Tubes. Seems they think that the machine you have and the one we just ordered will not work according to them. Same thing some other guy said here, sticky. But if they are working for you then I question how much of it is experience and marketing. I am sure you can clean the unit with ISO 91…How many have you ran through the Powermatic 3 with straight cannabis? How dry would you say the flower was? And what tube have you liked best and why? Thank you for your time and your box looks great! That seems to be the most expensive part of this process…
I have a friend that rolled 25 with the powermatic III then quit cause it kept clogging. He has been using the manual powermatic II but it’s a time-intensive process. I’ve rolled over 1,000 cigarettes before my first machine broke. The injector won’t retract back into the machine, maybe an easy fix?
It’s not how dry the material is I think. It’s how finely ground it is that affects how the machine works. If I keep my flower blend more coarsely ground then it works very well.
You need to Teflon coat the injector or run really light thc material
