Cigarette Papers

I have inherited a tin with pieces of shim of different thicknesses

I assumed that packs of "assorted sizes of shims" would be available but since I have more than a lifetime's supply have NOT investigated.

Are suck packs no longer available?

MC

I'd forgotten that I'd bought a pack of shim steel from Southwest Steam a while back, the thinnest was .002". I just looked again and they now list .001" so will put an order in later...

My dad used the cigarette paper method for setting up milling cutters on the Cincinnati No 2 vertical mill we had at home. They was 45 years ago. (He was 99 couple of weeks ago) He was a time served engineer at Cincinnati.
colin

An ounce of Old Holborn and a packet of green papers, that`s what I remember in the 60s, then going on holiday with me in the back of the sidecar and mum smoking that stuff, and me breathing it in. That put me of ever thinking of smoking for life, but I prefer a smoker than a vaper. A good tip with the green papers noted here as a stick on setting method, I shall get some.

Bob

An ounce of tobacco use to come foil wrapped or if you could afford it you could get a two ounce tin. When empty these tins came in very handy for storage, I still have a few but I haven't smoked for 30 years.

Tom.

I've got dozens, and I've never smoked. Neither did my father who I inherited them from!

George B.

My Dad smoked Golden Virginia, it came in very useful tins. I made a small chest of draws with six tins in metalwork when I was at school, I still keep Dremel grinding wheels etc in. They are great tins, ideal for allsorts as the lid has a seal, ideal for engineers blue!

Edited By Henry Brown on 09/08/2020 17:57:01

My brother was in the Royal Navy and a non smoker. He was advised on sign up to say he was a smoker so he could receive the tobacco allowance. When he came home on leave he always had a stack of baccy in tins with a "RN" logo on them. They were always gratefully received by my Dad who was a heavy "roll you own" smoker

The empty tins were great for making survival kits (I was into camping etc). Happy Days!

I always used to scrounge the tins and still use them 40 years on.

At the same time discovered they fitted perfectly into an internal mail letter rack that was being thrown out. So cut down the letter rack to fit my bench. Very handy for those small items.

These came with my s/h S7:

The Rizlas are 1 thou.

The Double As are 1.5 and may be genuine antiques

Stay well,

Rod

I have now had a belated response from Rizla+ and the lady with whom I was communicating refused to tell me the actual thickness (as against relative thickness) of the different products.

I have pointed out that there a big market in the engineering community - but no further response yet!

MC

I have used them, lick or wipe in oil on mill to stick them to edge being located but I now use a feeler gauge, metric set if working in metric or Imperial size set if using Imp dimensions, helps avoid conversion errors.

John

My sympathies are with the Rizla lady. Having been on the receiving end of public enquiries, they are often impossible, expensive or unwise to answer.

In this case, the answer is on Wikipedia, but 'thickness' is defined in a way requiring conversion. As usual with paper, thickness is defined by weight and area. Easier and more useful to weigh bulk products like paper than to micrometer individual sheets, which vary with compression etc. Thus a square metre of Rizla Silver paper weighs 13.5 grams.

Other Rizla paper weights from Wikipedia:

• 26.5 gm⁻² liquorice
• 23 white
• 20 orange
• 17.5 red (with cut corners green)
• 14.5 blue, pink

Sales of Rizla paper for engineering purpose are miniscule compared with their intended purpose. I suspect MC Black is the only person in the world who has contacted the company about linear thickness because no-one else cares.

I feel for the Rizla Lady. She's probably in the PR Department of Imperial Tobacco, who are the world's fourth largest maker of tobacco products. As Imperial Tobacco manufacture in Eastern Europe, she might have to speak fluent Hungarian to get an answer, assuming she can work out who in the company to ask.

A common reason firms don't provide information like this is fear of legal action. MCB's enquiry is innocent, but there are crooks who get companies to specify product details and then sue when real products don't match. Breach of contract claims; we invested $2M in our enterprise because you promised 'x'. In self-protection most products are sold with disclaimers like 'colour may vary' etc, and sellers avoid committing to details.

Rizla Paper for workshops is easy though. All the papers are suitable for edge finding and their exact thickness doesn't matter.

If a rough idea is needed, measure it. Earlier in the thread I found the simple average of Rizla Silver to be about 0.017mm and Robin Graham did a proper job on Rizla Green and got almost exactly a thou ( 24.56 +/- 0.18 microns, with 95% confidence interval 24.20 - 24.92 microns. )

Being close to 0.02mm makes Silver Paper slightly better for some metric dials, while Green does Imperial thou and metric 0.025 dials. It's not high-precision and the difference may not matter.

Dave

This was valuable knowledge when I was a Science teacher. An A4 sheet of 80 gsm paper weighs 5 grams, and there was an accurate balance in the prep room. No need to count the worksheets - simply weigh 'em out and weigh 'em back in - "Two more worksheets to come back, please." It worked every time.

It also worked with connecting leads, any other small components, and plasticine. Especially plasticine - it's very satisfying to see kids scrabbling about to find the pellets they flicked at their mates, when really they want to be going to break!

George B.

If we call the thickness a thou I doubt many of us will be bothered by the difference.

Mike

I treat anything on the Internet with caution.

Wikipedia especially

MC

What a fantastic read, which brings back memories for me of using Rizla Green papers for setting up either; milling cutters, drill bits, or lathe tools. I would also use them for checking the corners of folded boxes before they were welded and again after I had linished the welds and lips, to make sure they were flat before they went for plating. The boxes when the lid was put on would be EMC shielded.
Thanks for the memory.

Never having been a smoker....

The type of paper does not really matter, within reason, if you measure it first: I use a strip of ordinary printing paper, and "glue" it to the work with oil.

For other workshop purposes, expired plastic bank or club membership cards can be effective shims (measure first - but they appear of highly-accurate thickness). For bank cards, cut off the strip and embossing first, as instructed anyway. I set the magnetic readers on my mill's DRO using a "feeler-gauge" cut from a previous year's association card: non-magnetic.

....

I think the fondness, or preference, for cigarette paper is purely historical. The writers of the earlier model-engineering reference-works were great craftsman but still had to relay practices based on what they and most of their contemporaries had in their own workshops and homes. Besides, in their day far more people smoked than now.

Maybe someone of our next generation will gaze fondly on his, or her, Gold Medal winning, IMLEC-champion 7-1/4" g. 'Britannia'; and describe how to set up the ubiquitous 'Myford' 5-axis NC machine, using a plastics-free, nicotine-substitute, vapour-oil bottle...

What about the ink?

That was only an issue when I was a pupil. We had nearly covered the form-room ceiling with wads of chewed paper flicked up with a ruler, and some idiot soaked his in ink.

Form master noticed, and it was class detention to get them all down again with brooms... Can't reach? Stand on the desks!

George