A heads-up to all who are interested in owning a functional cutter (as opposed to a man cave decorative antique):
Getting old choppers to actually work the way today's pipe smokers ASSUME they will takes a bit of refurb & enhancement.
The blades they were originally equipped with were thin and flexy, designed to cut off lengths of sold-by-the-inch rope in general stores. That's it. They were not designed to slice plug into neat 1.5mm slices, loaf-of-bread style. That requires a much stiffer blade that's flat on one side like a sushi knife, and sharpened to where you could almost shave with it.
Such a blade must be custom made when intended for a particular model of antique rope cutter, of course.
Then, once you have a good blade, the entire surface leading "up to" it from feed side must be made level. That means cutting free the staked brass piece that receives the blade's edge (it's there because iron would instantly destroy a razor edge), grind it to dead-flush and reinstall; and then fabricate an equally level platform for the plug to rest on while it is indexing forward. Not doing those things will make slicing a plug a tedious, frustrating process with a messy result. (Delaminated leaves, thick & crumbly slices, etc.)
- that's a good point George,
and some of the cutters are either of a poor design or made of cheap material and end up breaking, many of them have gear teeth for the fulcrum lever and get broken, and others just seem to have a tendency for breakage, maybe due to age I dunno...
...but when you go looking you'll see a lot of the "elf tobacco cutter" (a more vulgar name in some catalogs) and I've seen alot of those that were broken, it's kinda cute yeah, but as a functioning useful tool it seems to be lacking...
I swear by my
Yankee Slicer as it is simple, solidly built, with ease of operation and easy to maintain, plus it's a smaller version than the bigger ones and easier to accomodate space-wise...
...and by God if I saw one of these British Joseph Elliot portable plug cutters with Sheffield blade for a reasonable price I'd buy it on the spot because this thing is cool as hell!!!!!
I'd agree!
Mostly because I love plugs and everything about them.
There is an incredible variety of different plug cutters out there,
here's a few...
Since I done went nutz with the images, might as well continue with the baccy itself, I don't know why they needed such elaborate devices because I thought that most chewing baccy was rather soft?
Maybe they come from an era before pre-cut plugs with "tin tags" were available?
Sent to the merchant in large pieces?
You notice than many of the cutters use a baccy name, like advertising for a certain brand.
Anyway,
chaw baccy used to be the most popular form of nicotine delivery in America by far,
even Micky Mouse's dog dug the plug!
So,
here's a neat little gallery of advertising from the age of USA chaw-plug baccies...
Yet of course, there are always other solutions too,
like if you're the engineering type and you're on a quest for ultimate mechanical superiority,
then I'd recco this:
:!: :P
:D 8O
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRyfuk0ydrU