Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust Plans to Sell Guillotina de Saka Cutter This Spring

Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust’s Guillotina de Saka cutter will be shipped to retailers this spring.

The single guillotine cutter is made with a 420 stainless steel blade inside of a stainless steel exterior case. Steve Saka, founder of Dunbarton, has been developing the cutter with Luigi Lucente, product development engineer at CigarMedics, Inc., which is the company that is producing the cutter. Lucente also designed The Baller, a cigar cutter that combines aspects of both a punch cutter and a v-cutter into one product.

According to Saka, the impetus behind the Guillotina de Saka—Spanish for Guillotine of Saka—came from his experience using the Cigar Bris Tool, a single guillotine cutter with a plastic body that Drew Estate sold until mid-2000. Saka worked as a Drew Estate executive and partner from 2005-2013.

The cutter includes a number of unique aspects, including the fact that the steel blade is designed to be easily replaceable by consumers without having to use any special tools. In addition, the Guillotina de Saka is designed with a different-sized opening on each side of the case; one side is designed to cut for cigars up to 48 ring gauge, while the other is designed for cigars of 50 ring gauge and thicker.

According to Saka, there are some changes that have been made to the production version of the Guillotina de Saka after receiving feedback from people who used the 150 prototypes that he gave to various people during the 2023 PCA Convention & Trade Show, including “minor tweaking of springs and testing of alternative blades.”

In an email, Steve Saka, founder of Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust, told halfwheel that the first production run would include 1,250 cutters, all of which will be covered in the same Cerakote OD Green finish that was used on the prototypes.

While Saka declined to give a shipping date other than “Spring of 2024″ or a final MSRP for the cutter, he did indicate that he expects the price to range between $300-350.