Watch Here:

Introduction

Hey guys, Sneaky Pete here and today I want to do something a little bit different; I want to throw it back to the old school. In 2020, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of vaporizers, there are so many excellent devices on the market in every style and price point you could want. But this wasn’t always the way. I don’t want to date myself, but when Sneaky Pete was growing up you didn’t have quite the choices that you had today, and let’s just leave it at that.

If you wanted to buy a vaporizer, there wasn’t a lot of diversity on the market, you couldn’t really buy anything online with any ease, and most vaporizers were really expensive.  

We used regular joints, metal pipes (ugh gross), glass pipes, bongs, parachutes which I may go over another day, but our go to was always hot knives, or as we called them, blade tokes. 

So today, I want to show you how we used to do it back in the day, and if anyone gives this a try, please tag me on Instagram so I can see you do some blade tokes. 

Let’s go over first what you need, then the personnel involved, and finally the process.

What is a Blade Toke?

Blade tokes are dead simple, but kind of genius. Essentially, all you are doing is ripping your flower into small pieces, rolling and compacting that in a small ball, and then putting it between two hot butter knives which you then inhale off of.  

Sounds pretty wild, right? Well, it is also incredibly effective, and really hits hard so even though it’s old school, don’t count it out just yet.

Necessary Equipment

One of the best things about hot knives is you need very little equipment.  The only critical equipment is two butter knives, ideally two identical knives as you don’t want one to heat up much differently than the other one, and then a heat source. The most common and easiest heat source is a coil type stove, and back when we were doing blade tokes this was by far the standard. 

Today, you see more flat-top stoves out there and they would be pretty tough to do hot knives on, but you can also do blade tokes on a gas stove, on a camp stove, even on just a straight up little propane torch or a dab torch.

For a proper blade toke kit, though, you will also need a small dish to grab the tokes off of. If you set them on your counter, you are inevitably going to burn you’re the surface with a hot knife at some point. A small plate turned upside down is the ideal work surface as it has a small lip to hold the tokes in, so less ‘man down’ situations. 

Also, you’re going to need yourself a hooter. Now, don’t judge, you have to work with what you have, but the most popular tool by far was a 2L pop bottle. You can literally just cut this in half, make sure you remove the label first and rinse it out, and then you’re simply going to hold the blades in your hooter, and inhale.

I’ve used a lot of different things for hooters. If you can cleanly break off a beer bottle that is always nice as then you’re using glass instead of plastic, but in a pinch, you don’t actually need a hooter, you can just inhale directly from the blades. If you are doing this, be sure you trust your ability to execute the technique, as I have certainly seen some butter knife burns on people’s lips, not a good look.

Pretty simple, right?  You probably have everything you need at home for a fun science project this afternoon, now let’s talk about the personnel.

Personnel

You can definitely fly solo missions, I’ve certainly done it, but if you’re going it alone you really do need to be careful. You don’t want to hold the blades too far away when you’re hitting them, or it’s all going to be wasted, and you do need to apply some pressure between the blades, so you really don’t want to accidentally slip. 

Fly solo only when necessary, but in general you want a partner, and the person dishing out your blade toke is called the driver as they’re driving the session. Make sure you trust your driver as you’re always worried about that dreaded slip, which in the worst-case scenario can burn you, but otherwise it’s just going to go into that plastic hooter which is also less than ideal while you’re inhaling.

If the person dishing out the heat is the driver that would make the person taking the hit the passenger, so let’s strap in and get this journey started.

Method

If you’re using a coil top stove, you’re going to place the blades into the coil so that you get maximum surface area between those two pieces of the element. If you’re using a propane stove or a torch, you really can’t get them too hot for this, so just place them directly in the flame.

In general, I recommend getting some cheap butter knives as they will be nice and thin. If you have some high-end thick butter knives, there’s going to be too much material and they won’t get hot enough to properly hit.

I’m going to give the knives about five minutes to heat up as this isn’t a powerful burner, but if you are heating your knives with a propane torch for example you can be ready for a blade hit in as little as 20 seconds. 

While the blades are heating up, I’m going to prepare my tokes. You have a lot of latitude when selecting your toke size, you can do really small tokes if you want and the material will almost completely vaporize, it doesn’t really leave ash but more of a small compressed disc of leftover plant material. 

However, if you want, you can do massive blade tokes. I have seen people do almost a marble size blade toke if they are using a propane torch and man, does that ever hit you right between the eyes.

Once your knives are ready, the passenger needs to get in position. Let the driver tell you where to stand as there needs to be a natural flow from the burner to your plate to where you will be standing, so plan your hit before you pull your knives out of the burner.

Now when driving, I like to pull one of my knives out at a time, so the other knife can retain maximum heat. Take one of your blades and you’re going to gently press it down on your compacted ball of flower. You don’t want to push it too hard or you are going to start the vaporizing/burning process, but you have to push it hard enough so the piece will stick to the hot knife.

Once you grab it with the hot knife, gently place the second knife on the other side, and bring it over to your passenger while holding the blades within the hooter. You want to hold them directly in the middle, so the plastic won’t get too hot, but as the passenger is constantly inhaling it’s not going to build up much heat anyways.

Finally, when you are ready to start the actual hit, you have your flower so that it sandwiched in between the two hot knives, and then you were going to push the two knives towards each other while slightly rotating your wrists. 

You don’t want to go so hard that you’re going to slip and have a wild hot knife go somewhere, but you do need to apply that pressure so that the entire ball can get consumed properly.

Keep pressing them together until you see no more smoke/vapour coming off, and then you can take your knives over the sink and simply scrape the little remnants down the drain, then back into the heating elements they go to heat up again for another hit. 

You can do nonstop blade hits, which is great for sessions or a party, and if you have two sets of blades then you can have one heating while somebody is doing a hit.

Enhancements

Now if you do actually want to give this a try, I would highly recommend this enhancement: upgrading to the ice hooter. 

Take that other half of the 2L bottle which we cut off, and then you’re going to poke about 6 to 12 holes in the bottom with a sturdy knife. 

Next, take some ice cubes and break them up a little bit but not too much, and then place that in the top half of the 2L. Once you have some ice in there, you are going to invert the bottom of the 2L bottle and firmly place it in the top of the bottle so that it sits within the top piece and holds all of the ice in place. 

After you get this together, I would recommend putting it in your freezer for 30 minutes so it can set, and then you’ll find that this should stay together very well until you are ready to change the ice. Adding in an ice hooter makes a world of difference, and for any serious blader, this is a must in your arsenal.

One other thing that is great about hot knives is that you can use multiple different substances with this method. If you don’t have a nice nug that you can break off a toke, you can simply scoop ground herb with one blade and press it with the other, and you can also do this for Kief or bubble hash. It’s a super versatile system and it can’t get much simpler than this.

Overall Thoughts

I think every once in a while, it’s a good idea to step back and really appreciate where we are at in the market right now. Consuming flower wasn’t always as easy, inexpensive and healthy as it is today, but that certainly didn’t stop people from being creative and always figuring out new and highly effective methods to consume.

Hot knives were a staple of the experience in my circle growing up; I have a lot of good memories involving these blades, and a lot of hazy ones as well. If you have the equipment at home and you want to try it, seriously, let me know how you like it. You might find it a really fun thing to pull out at a party or while you are camping with friends!

Check out vapenorth.ca and sneakypetestore.com to soon find all of the accessories and vapes you see me go over in my videos.

Thanks so much for watching guys, I really appreciate it,

KIG KIS