Cigarette tamper
A cigarette stuffer is a handy device that can be used to squeeze tobacco into a filter tube for domestic cigarette production . In contrast to the cigarette rolling machine , prefabricated cigarette tubes are used.
Most cigarette fillers work on the same principle: the device is evenly filled with tobacco, closed with the lid and the tobacco is pressed into the sleeve clamped at the front opening using a sliding mechanism. There are also tabletop models of the tamper with a large lever and a tobacco shaft. Here the shaft is filled, then the tobacco is compressed and then pushed into the tube.
There are two common types of filter tubes on the German market, the cheap king-size filter tubes (69 mm filling length) and the slightly more expensive Xtra-size filter tubes (60 mm). Both filter sleeves are the same size, only the filter and slightly also the orange mouthpiece are longer in the Xtra-Size (also called Special-Size in West). This means that the capacity of the Xtra-Size filter tubes is 13% less than that of the King-Size filter tubes. For the tamper, this means that the tobacco either enters the tube in a more compressed state or that correspondingly less tobacco is required. Since it is not customary to smoke beyond the mouthpiece, the smoke length of the cigarette can remain approximately the same. The somewhat higher price of these filters would then be outweighed by the amount of tobacco that can be saved with the same amount of smoke.
Even stuffed cigarettes are cheaper than industrially manufactured filter cigarettes.