A nine month review of my Powermatic IV
Each week before my wife was hospitalized last June we’d buy me a $100 carton of American Spirit unfiltered cigarettes and she’d buy two cartons of Virginia Slim Menthol Gold 120s that cost almost $100 each. Tax and all we spent $300 a week on cigarettes.
We never missed a payment either, weren’t ever late.
(By the way her medical condition is not in the slightest related to smoking. She has a bad back, and took too many Motrins in order to work for me at my office.)
We have saved, without exaggeration, over $15,000 not buying cigarettes this last year.
For the first three months I stuffed tubes with first a cheap hand stuffer and later a cheap electric stuffer, and since September with the Powermatic IV.
Buoy Gold cigarettes cost right at 75 cents a package tax paid. I can roll a package while I smoke a cigarrete, it’s a few minutes.
Unlike my wife the only thing wrong with me is 67 years and a spare tire around my middle, yet my blood pressure is 117 over 78 and my lung function is 98% and I might outlive my 92 year old grandfather who smoked, dipped, snuffed, and chewed for about 86 years and died from infection from an overgrown toenail and old age,,,,smoking his last Camel.
But seriously, I feel better and never seem to cough after a year of natural tobacco cigarettes with a filter. When I find old packages of factory cigarettes I wonder how I ever smoked those harsh, strong things for over fifty years. You really can make milder and better cigarettes with a tube stuffer. The Rouse family has eight generations of experience in Kinston North Carolina manufacturing good tobacco and they are extremely skilled at it by now.
And if you don’t prefer Buoy Gold I’ve counted over fifty different ribbon cut economy blends of tobacco you can buy online, and there are probably more. We are living in a golden age of cheap stuff your own cigarettes.
The power switch on my Powermatic has been kind of stuck in the on position for months, and I have one in reserve but I’m waiting until my first one dies to put it in service. I’m Scottish.
Stuffing your own is well over ten times cheaper than buying name brand cigarettes in Missouri, which is the most sin tax friendly jurisdiction in the entire free world.
As for smoking Buoy Gold in a pipe, it’s a delicious strait Virginia forward type smoke with not a trace of toppings or casings or any PG. There’s likely a small amount of burley for sweetness and Maryland to help it burn.
North Carolina bright leaf is, North Carolina bright leaf. You like it or you don’t. The more its aged, the better it is and more notes of hay and citrus.
I just ordered enough Buoy Gold and Classic Red King tubes to make 10,000 smokes plus some left over for a pipe.
With all the money I save I can keep on accumulating $25 ancient, oil cured, aged, unstained, unvarnished, and unpainted Algerian pipes.
My Buoy Gold is likely 100% domestic tobaccos but I’ve never seen a package of any kind of cigarette paper or tube that was American made, in over fifty years, although there are Canadian and German and Belgian brands.
The French and the Spanish are just a lot better at cigarrete papers than all the rest of the world for over two hundred years, or maybe five hundred years, a long, long time for certain.
en.m.wikipedia.org
But if they get tariffed, they cost less than a penny each today retail.
And you really can smoke it in a pipe, too.