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| title | description | date | tags | synopsis | imageURL | imageAlt | mastodon_id | author | ||||||||
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| The Skinny on Incense Stick Extruders | The good, the bad, and the ugly of manual incense stick extruders. | 2025-01-23 |
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The good, the bad, and the ugly of manual incense stick extruders. | /img/extruders/extr3_3x_tip_compressed.webp | A close shot of an incense extruder tip with three extrusion holes. | 113879431946665708 |
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Given that hobbyist incense making hasn't exactly been all the rage since the tang dynasty, finding good incense-making equipment for small-scale home production can be a bit of a tribulation. If you make Chinese or Japanese style coreless incense, one of the first hurdles on the way to kitting out your very own mini incense workshop is choosing a manual extruder. Now that I finally feel confident that I've overcome this particular hurdle, here's what I've learned:
Where to Find a Suitable Extruder
When searching for manual extruders, the first thing you'll likely come across is something like a Makin's clay extruder. This style of extruder often comes with a series of small discs designed to extrude clay noodles of different diameters. These are best avoided; other incense makers have found that extruding incense through these flat discs tends to create noodles with a coarse texture that must be rolled smooth after extrusion. Omitting this style of extruder from your search drastically narrows your options, but searching "incense extruder" on the website of any major online retailer that dropships or stocks a large number of products from China is likely to net you results featuring extrusion tips better suited to incense making. If you are willing to wait a bit for delivery, however, rather than paying Walmart, Amazon, or Ebay a convenience tax, you will have no trouble finding manual extruders on AliExpress directly for much less of your hard-earned coin. Carl "The Incense Dragon" Neal also sells a Makin's style extruder that includes a series of 3D-printed extrusion tips allowing smooth incense extrusion.
Extruders I've Tried
The Syringe-Style Extruder
The internet is riddled with syringe-style incense extruders. Despite Carl's warning regarding plastic extruders, I had to give one a go just to see for myself how they performed.
I cannot recommend this style of extruder. When making incense dough, it's important to use as little water as possible to avoid excessive warping during the drying stage. When attempting to extrude dough of the usual level of hydration through a 2mm tip, I was physically unable to coax any dough whatsoever beyond the extrusion tip, and I am not a weak man. This extruder was a complete bust.
There are a range of metal extrusion tips readily available for these extruders, so someone must be using them for something, but I found them completely unsuited for my purposes.
The Aluminum Option
Also relatively easy to find, these aluminum extruders are well-made and effective:
So long as you keep the o-ring on the piston lubricated and your dough doesn't have any large chunks, the extrusion tip produces a nice, smooth noodle of incense dough, and the turning action greatly reduces the hand-strength required to operate the device.
There are a couple of small issues, namely that the caps on the turning rod can come unscrewed mid-batch if they aren't firmly screwed on, and the soft metal is prone to damage if you aren't careful. Despite these nitpicks, however, I have no hesitation in recommending this style of extruder to any incense maker focusing on thin coreless sticks.
My First Stainless Steel Extruder
As I've been working on scaling up my production to a level that would allow me to sell a few orders of incense here and there, my interest was sparked in this stainless steel extruder on AliExpress:
Specifically, I hoped that the optional extrusion tip with three outlets and the vise accessory would allow me to speed up the extrusion process. I also liked the idea of a heavy-duty item that would last for many years. I bought the "high order style," which comes with four extrusion tips, a grip, some o-rings and small cleaning tools, and the extruder itself. I also ordered the three-outlet extrusion tip, and the "sucker holder," AKA a vacuum-base vise.
To start, the three-hole extrusion tip worked, but as anyone who works with larger manual extruders knows, the flow rate from each hole isn't necessarily even. This is less of a problem when you're extruding, say, six to twelve sticks at once at a proper station with a waste bucket and a stack of boards to catch the extruded incense, but when you're hand-cranking three sticks at a time and one is firing out like billy-oh, another is extruding at the usual rate, and the last seems frightened of daylight, you realize that you would have been better off just using a normal single-outlet tip.
The vise was useful, however; it's much more efficient to be able to keep the extruder in one place and have a free hand to catch the sticks on a board. The problem I faced with it was that in order to get the extruder to fit within the vise, I had to fasten an included aluminum ring around the main body of the extruder using two grub-screws. These grub screws cut into the grip on the tube, which eventually tore from the force applied during extrusion.
The extruder itself appeared to be assembled from mostly off-the-shelf parts, and not especially good ones. The rings that held the turning-rod in place rusted immediately after I got them a little wet, the threads were crunchy and coarse, and the interior of the dough-tube was very dirty. Perhaps most strangely of all, the piston, or plunger, that actually pushed the dough down the tube was not attached to the threaded rod at all, unlike the aluminum extruder.
The plunger is made of mostly brass parts that screw together and a rubber o-ring. It's very thick, reducing room for dough, and the soft brass is rapidly worn away by the stainless steel threaded rod as it spins loosely down the dough tube during extrusion, leaving sparkly grit to get mixed into your next batch of incense. It continued to wear even after I had filed and sanded down the raised parts on the end of the threaded rod.
As a result of all this, the plunger becomes more worn with every use, the dough tube becomes covered in grime, and the extrusion action is crunchy and rough. I was very disappointed in this extruder, and I cannot recommend it. The silver lining here is the vise, which will work with any of the metal extruders listed; in my opinion it's a worthwhile purchase.
My Current Extruder
This extruder was an enigma. I hadn't seen it anywhere before it surfaced several pages deep into an Amazon search.
I tried to find a Chinese source through a reverse image search. Tineye, Google, Bing, and Yandex turned up nothing. Only when I began to search the sales copy in the Amazon listing did I find the item for sale elsewhere but I still never managed to find a single instance of this product being sold on AliExpress (if you manage to find one, do let me know).1
It looked great: stainless steel; a knurled dough tube; various accessories included. The Amazon listing didn't show it, but when I looked at other listings I saw that the piston appeared to be attached to the threaded rod. Jackpot!
When it arrived, I noticed a few things immediately. The knurling was shallow and not especially neat, as though it had been etched twice over and the etchings didn't quite align. The tips shown weren't included; instead of five tapered tips in different sizes, I received three flat 2mm tips. That might be a deal-breaker for some, as I don't even know where you'd begin to find additional tips for this thing, but as I extrude 2mm sticks almost exclusively, I don't mind. I'm also not bothered by the ugly knurling either, because the performance of this extruder is great.
To begin with, the threaded rod isn't some industrial looking piece of hardware like the last stainless extruder; it looks more like a high-quality leadscrew you'd expect to see on a laser cutter or some other piece of CNC equipment where precise, measured movement is critical. This keeps the extrusion action exceptionally smooth. The threads on all of the other caps are also nicely machined, and the small extrusion tips have minimal space to accumulate wasted dough after a batch is extruded.
Fitted into my vise, this extruder is a dream. The smoothness and consistency of the extrusion makes one-handed operation a breeze. I did add some o-rings to the turning rod to reduce noise, and while I do find myself wishing it didn't fit quite so loosely inside the cap on the leadscrew, these really are nitpicks of the best extruder I've used to date.
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I have since found what appears to be the same item on AliExpress, Taobao, Wepost (which has a very dramatic video showing the extruder in operation), and 1688.com. Accessories also appear to be available through these sources. ↩︎