Tips on keeping your pipe lit

Practice , y'all have come up with great ideas on proper filling of pipes, drying tobacco out. Maybe their could be a flaw with a certain pipe you own, I enjoy smoking from a cob seems to take some guess work out of the equation. Trial and error, I'm sure some vets will chime in..

Two tobaccos that consistently give me fits, in a number of pipes, are Seattle Pipe Club’s Plum Cake and Mississippi River Select. Has anyone else found these to be a bit wet? I’ve packed them by tearing them a part, by folding, and by “chunking”, but cannot keep them lit for more than about 4-5 good puffs. Ribbon cuts I have no trouble with.

Thank you, I will give it a try. 

BTW, it’s SPC Plum Pudding, not Cake as I put in my original post.

Lighter fluid soak

I've been using this method and it never lets me down...

This and getting the "pack" just right.  Too loose, lots of tamping and a short smoke. Too tight, lots & lots of relights and a less than satisfying smoke.   For whatever reason, it took me too long to figure out that the object of packing a pipe was NOT to see how much I could cram in the bowl.  Life has been smoother since I discovered the  fallacy in my logic.

I've never had a pipe that I didn't have to relight at least once. When I have many multiple relights, it's most often because I didn't dry it enough and/or packed it too tight. Usually, the latter. I tried the Goldilocks approach for a while (soft medium, hard) and that always gave me problems. Now, I use a loose rendition of the Frank method, but I don't even use as much tobacco as most people. It's worked out pretty well.

If it goes out, I relight. I don't think much about it beyond that.

Tim West has said that the best way to build up a "cake" is via relights... but I don't believe in "cakes", so... FWIW...

I let my cakes build to about a dime's width... keeps a cooler pipe to the touch and helps to absorb a bit of moisture, FWIW.

+1 on this..

I've found that a really good charring and true light helps. Like, get a really good ember going.

Not solutions, but some observations:

MM and MM Hardwood pipes burn better after tamping. This can also go for narrower chamber pipes. If I am smoking away on an MM and the puff gets a little light, I tamp and the dadgummed load goes down 50% and then puffs away.

On wider bowls tamping around the edge to form a center helps, but takes longer and you will probably relight it.

I'm somewhat of a puffer, though learning to draw Five Brothers without turning into London Fog has helped with other blends. Anyway, the continual working at my smokes seems to keep them lit one I get past initial "flame on"

There's no skirting around the necessity of practice and patience.

The "right" pack will vary from smoker to smoker, depending on that smoker's habits, the blend being used, and the particular chamber size. When it comes to packing, I'll do anything from a codger scoop to a gravity feed, and all points in between. It varies on the blend involved.

Flakes I either cube cut or rub out. I'm not a fan of stuff and fold. But if you want to try stuff and fold, consider setting up your pipe the day before you are going to smoke it, to give the flake some drying out time. Reserve a little bit of the flake to finely rub out and sprinkle over the top before lighting, so that it acts like tinder to help get the whole edge of the flake going. Even then, flakes can vary in their burn rate.

About the only constant is that I dry my tobacco until it is almost bone dry before packing. The level of dryness varies a little depending on the particular blend, but all of them taste better bone dry.

A charring light, gently tamped after the charring light goes out, gives a nice insulating layer of ash over the top. A match gives me more control on getting an even light over the entire circumference of the bowl.

I don't worry about relights. Some blends are easy to keep lit to the bottom of the bowl and others just don't stay lit.

My cadence varies automatically depending on how the tobacco is burning. I don't use any sort of strict cadence. After a while you develop a sense for how the tobacco is burning.

At this point in my smoking "career" I really just don't think about it. I just light up, enjoy a flavorful cool smoke, and sometimes I have to relight, and sometimes I don't.

So here is an idea. Not for everyone, but for those starting out.

My first questions were, is it me, is it the pipe, or is it the tobacco?

So to figure this out, I might start with one pipe. And one tobacco. And practice till you can master that particular pipe and that particular tobacco. With proper pipe loading, puffing cadence, tamping cadence, and of course tobacco treatment, all of the stuff talked about above.

If you can get one tobacco to work in one pipe, then you know its not you. When using a different pipe or different tobacco you may have to change things up, let this one dry a little more, tamp this one a bit more frequently, puff a little slower on that, but you will get the intuition down as to what to change. But first get control of the process with one pipe and one tobacco.

My suggestion would be a cob, a MM Country Gentleman, and some Carter Hall. It tastes fine and is very well behaved. Once you can keep that lit for longer periods, you will be way ahead of the situation.

Once you can drive a car, you only need to learn the idiosyncrasies of each car you drive in the future.