I hate to sound like a broken record but prepping your feedstock is 90% of this process. Correctly prepped feedstock is critical to a well done pre-roll and the time you spend in preparation pays off when it comes time to really roll your joints.  You have heard me before, but just to review, here are the basics:

Shred to a 1/8’ minus screen.
Pre-measure your load before stuffing the plate
Cool your feedstock to about 37F
Keep the moisture content ~ 8-10%

For shredding/screening, hands down the best is the one on this website. It will shred and screen more or less 5# of raw feedstock down to 1/8” minus in about 12 seconds. You can get the one that just shreds but why would you? It will take you another hour to an hour and a half to screen the 5# by hand and that just cost you what, $30 – $40? How many times do you do that over the course of 5 years before that extra cost pays for itself?

You want to weigh out your feedstock and bag it before you use it. When you bag it, you will want to use a 55% invierment to keep your moisture content in the 8-10% range. That information comes courtesy of some Las Vegas growers via the kind folks over at Desiccare Inc & Integra Products. Those are the guys who make those dessicant packs you use for longer term storage.

We suggest cooling your feedstock to help in keeping your feedstock from clumping. This comes from the food preparation industry. If you have something that is sticky (feedstock) you can either add something to it (think extra flour to bread dough) or you cool it down. Adding something to the feedstock to keep it from clumping is a non-starter which leaves cooling things down. If you are working w/ infused feedstock, you will want to go sub-zero in order to keep things from clumping.

None of this can totally substitute for a conscientious operator. This isn’t rocket science, but if your operator doesn’t care, it will show up in your end product. If you have an observant and conscientious operator they will notice the little differences between feedstocks and can adjust their actions according to the material they are working with.