Hey Guys,
Wanted to see if anybody had any advice on producing prerolls from flower that burn well and don’t canoe or run or end up with the last third of the preroll “collapsing” making it hard or impossible to draw. I’m using a Python grinder from Tom’s and Knock Boxes and I’m trying to figure out the best base settings to prevent the above issues. Any advice on adjusting for different variables strain to strain is also welcome.
Thanks guys
I would say typically canoeing is not a paper issue, but an issue with how the weed is packed into it. If your joints are clogging up closer to the filter, try cutting your filter in half, or using a filter with wider spacing to allow for more airflow. I agree the clogging is an issue especially with resin infused joints, but I’ve found switching the filters up makes a big difference.
take this with a grain of salt as i’m not an expert on pre-rolls!
Could be manufacturer tall tales but I have been told that the closing them in a crown fashion helps create a more central coal. Anecdotally… maybe.
I might recommend perhaps more finer material. All my issues really revolve around the differences in material. Balled up and chunky material is usually the most difficult. It creates problems all the way down our stm line. So we do what we must to achieve a minimal material size… sift if you must. Not sand, but finer than you would get generally from one milling. Always a moving target pretty much from strain to strain or run to run. Hell if it’s hot and humid in your work space that’s not helping either.
Good filled cones/prerolls are kind of an art if you ask me. No one thing will likely fix this.
I would try getting finer material or atleast confirm when you have a firm idea of what fine trim is smoking like. Pm if you want tricks on getting particulate size down without totally beating all the love off.
I would fill the first 20% slower. Ah and mix all that material up real good once it’s milled and keep mixing as you poor/fill. I would fill slower. Meaning add material to the holes at a slower rate and in smaller increments. Try to fill evenly so all are agitated at a similiar amount. Good grade chop sticks are handy for a myriad of reasons.
In short I would try to reduce “pockets” of infilled cone, no matter how small….that will add an uneven/increased burn in that spot. And I would toy with your closing. How do you currently close?
One operator may use my exact equipment and disagree with most of what I have said. It’s kind of an art in that way to me. Get someone who makes nice spliffs and try not to lose them!!!
Good luck. I love prerolls but it’s a tough squeeze and my market is entranced by dog walkers…. Those are fun to make. 
I absolutely love rolling joints and honestly the biggest thing to me in terms of canoe-ing is how the material is shredded. I noticed when you use the grinders that have the stubs vs. the types that are more geared toward shredding you see it a lot more. To me it seems like canoe-ing is a crossbred problem between material not being ground down correctly (think how you see cigarette tobacco shredded up) and ‘hot spots’ of too much density. It’s a very fine line between not ground enough and too ground up. The way I can tell if i’m going to get a good joint that won’t have any canoe to it is when I go to finish up and ‘loop’ the paper over (and I know, this isn’t a way to tell when using pre-roll equipment but this is my test nonetheless) if you get that ‘bounce’ when you give it a gentle squeeze. Almost the same way if you give a well cured nug a squeeze it’ll puff back out.
Humidity of the material you’re rolling up is also HUUUUUGE. Dry-dry material will give you way more problems.
I reread your post closer. Less chunky material. Fill first 20% slow as hell. Small additions to tray nothing direct in holes. Go slow until you do a whole run with perfect foundations above the crutch. These will all come out super heavy. Once you have a run that is good in “strength” for the first 20% of the cone after the crutch. If you run the cycle really long it will be packed so tight it will be unusable… however from there they increase rate of fill and shortening your cycle time. To get as close to manufacturer sop. But no material will follow any exact sop unless you can mimic particle size every time.
Tricks: tape all but one row of holes so you can do quick smaller runs to dial in a material.
Take your time. 10 sellable joints are better than 100 reputation killers.
When the material is bouncing up and down the cone is likely full. If it’s still spinning, it’s likely still filling a bit.
Go slow on your first 20% and fill them all evenly so they all agitate the same. Slow is fast. Hand sprinkle if you have to for first part of cones.
Contact your manufacturer for the box and see what their standard sop is.
Let me know!
Thank you.
I’m reasonably sure I would have come up with that if I’d ever been the one responsible for setting up the knock box…but I definitely recall LOTS of “here try smoking this” when the first one set up in my vicinity was put into service.
Yeah man for sure! If im having big problems I will get down to like 5 holes. Iv torn up enough cones for a few lifetimes.
Imo density is not the culprit for quick uneven burning.
Think about cigarettes. People usually pack them. Meaning hit them on the filter side as soon as they buy the box. This packs down the tobacco making it more dense and allowing for less oxygen to get into the burn and burn faster. You can make them so tight that eventually they are hard to smoke. They burn super slow in your hand and are hard to get much when you draw. No air flow.
Same with joints. Two ways to make roll or fill cones. Big issue with expensive rolling machines is dialing in the tightness of the roll. Because it acts as the same. To tight… hard to get good drags off of. Ciggy Manufactures love loose rolls. Burns fast in your hand… oh shit I need another.
I believe a similar thing happens with cone filling…. But opposite.Chunky material makes uneven fills. Making flimsy joints and pockets of air to quickly burn because there’s nothing else to burn there. A chunk gets caught and below that chunk the pocket forms. That makes your burns run.
Yes you can fill too much with too fine of material. It will be tightening the “roll” by increasing volume but also density. This will make it stronger. Go backwards from there to your sweet spot.
I’m not advocating for sand consitency.
Cigarettes use expanded tobacco and strips of reconstituted tobacco paper and lamina of tobacco leaf of very specific size so there are no airflow or burning issues.
Cigarettes that are hand packed extensively …Will quantifiably burn slower and be harder to get large hits off of.
They still hit just fine when packed, because of how they process the tobacco. I used to smoke these joints that had a cigarette filter, called incognitos. Always had clogging issues, canoeing and them just catching on fire if I did get one that didn’t clog.
I’m with you they they will still smoke fine if packed. But if you pack a pack of cigarettes for say 10 minutes. It will be tighter than ants vagina.
It’s the same idea with these cones… but harder because the cones are most narrow at the bottom, hence more likely to create a pocket by chunky material getting stuck at the narrow bottom. It’s why the first 20% is so important.
Knock box/ rocket box/ idea is vibrate the material down into the cone. Same mechanism as packing cigarettes.
I don’t care what fancy material are in cigarettes. If you pack something long enough it’s going to compress. That’s going to make it burn slower. The opposite is flimsy and burning fast…that comes from loose rolls or pockets of air. It sounds like op has pockets so pronounced that the spliff is caving in.
That’s the basic principle I was trying to make an analogy for.
I’ll pack a pack of cigarettes for 20 minutes for you and have a substantially lower fill line. Where does the material go?
It stays in the tube, but the cigarette will still hit fine (because of the fancy materials in the cigarettes). I’ve never had a single cigarette clog on me the way I’ve had pre-rolls clog on my like a quarter of the time.
Have a good weekend brother.
Try out the Hummingbird PRS completely eliminates the canoe
