Review: Premier Supermatic II Cigarette Injector

Smoking is a very bad habit and one I enjoy immensely. In an effort to mitigate the expense ($8-a-pack prices in New York are brutal) I bought a “Premier Supermatic II,” an automatic cigarette making machine. A step down from the top-end “Supermatic,” the primary difference is an open-bottom design (the Supermatic has an all-rubber pad), a plastic case instead of a metal one, and the ability to only make “King Size” cigarettes. Since I only ever smoke King Size, which are the default size of American cigarettes, I figured I’d save a few bucks and settle for the Supermatic II.

The Supermatic isn’t a cigarette rolling machine but instead an “injector.” Fill its tobacco hopper, mount a “slug” (an empty paper tube with a filter inside; a cigarette without the tobacco), and turn the crank. The first part of the turn compresses the tobacco and snips off any errant bits, while the follow through shoves the tobacco into the tube. The machine also has a rubber nub that grabs the tip of the slug to prevent it from being dislodged when the tobacco, guided by a serrated ovipositor, is injected inside with a spring-loaded clang.

It took a little practice to figure out the right amount of tobacco to put into the hopper and how much to tamp it down—too much and the cigarette is too tight to draw smoke through; too little and it won’t pack back to the filter, which makes for a fragile cigarette—but now I can crank out eight to fill my cigarette case in ten minutes or less. And if you ignore the little tuft of loose tobacco at the end (which can be snipped off with scissors if you like), they look, smoke, and taste just like store-bought American Spirits. (I am using a tin of American Spirit tobacco to load them.)

You can’t beat the price. (Even if you count in the cost to society of my eventual lung cancer.) The machine was $35. A thousand empty tubes—five cartons worth—were $12. And the tobacco, which I’m guessing will make about two-thirds or more of a carton’s worth of cigarettes, was $18. Price aside, I’m looking forward to blending my own tobaccos to fully explore what this carcinogen has to offer before I give it up entirely.

I purchased my Supermatic II at RYO Tobacco, who were not very helpful when I asked if they had any suggestions for tobaccos for a novice at blending.