Just got a tin of Viking Blond. Do those guys stick the lid on with super glue or what!? Never had a tin half as bad! I’m gonna have to use a tin opener or drill a hole in it or something!
The closed blade of a penknife or 50 pence piece will do it.
Happened to me with two different WoS tins. Not worth it, I thought and threw them out.
@Kiwi78 You shouldn’t have given up so easily, IMHO. From a merely pecuniary point of view, I cannot condone your actions, nor from that of a curious nose! As for the vacuum sealed tins, I agree with @Whippet.
@MarvinLapsus I’ve come to treat regular Wilsons of Sharrow with a bit of contempt. In saying that, international trading or giving unwanted snuffs away for free isn’t really an option for me anyway. I live in New Zealand so there’s always postage.
The closed blade of a penknife or 50 pence piece will do it.
@Whippet, thank you. That worked, just a very tight vacuum seal. Can’t complain, keeps it fresh.
My Viking Dark likes to reseal.
Wos tins are poor. Ive stabbed myself in the hand on innumerable occasions trying to open them. Viking tins are ok Imo as they are vacumn sealed so the snuff stays fresh. You can always decant into a snuff box once opened. I had to put a hole in my last wos tin to get the snuff out.
Good advice on opening the Viking tins, I use a butter knife blade and twist it, comes away easily. With WoS, wear rubber gloves to get a better grip. Easy-peasy.
Managed to get nearly half a tin of SG’s London Brown over the kitchen floor after becoming so frustrated with trying to get it open, that I stabbed through the bottom to beak the seal of it a long time back - This was before I discovered 'the knack; with these tins 
WoS is a different story, I still have a nearly empty tin of #22 that is impossible to open, needs a knife every time 
I understand completely the difficulty with SG and Viking tins… my very first I tired of my butter knife slipping and settled for the bottle opener in excitement. However I’ve never had a problem with WoS tins, I just squeeze from opposite sides, rotate, squeeze from opposite sides, and it’s never failed on even my most stubborn tins.
The bigger 10g or 25g Wilsons tins are easy enough to open if jammed, squeeze the sides until you hear a little click, then it’s released and should open. The 5g tins usually seem to small to do that with though…
Viking.
I had a WoS tin that was completely rusted shut. It had a moist snuff in it, Prince’s Special or something. I held it on its side over a sheet of paper and smacked the edge with a hammer. That made the sides buckle and it gave way. Surprisingly, the snuff inside was absolutely fine. I guess the rust ‘welding’ must have formed an airtight seal and kept it fresh. Maybe they did it on purpose 
The SG tins and the Viking tins open quite easily with the fat (dull) end of a pocket knife (the knife should be folded when opening the tin of course), which is much thicker than a coin. It is actually not a problem at all with this method. I noticed that Whippet recommended a penknife but a larger pocket knife seems to work even better for me. The WoS tins, on the other hand, regardless of whether easy or difficult to open, are cheap and pathetic, especially with the tape they use for a so-called “seal.” I don’t know how a self-respecting company can put their product in such trashy packaging. It makes me wonder… #-o
Pathetic is being kind to WoS tins. I’d rather get it in a ziplock sammitch bag. I really like the Toque/SWS tins as Fred mentioned to me. Best for ease, but the vac tins are good for something I guess.
Their tins are indeed bad in quality, to the point that even fairly dry snuffs make them a pile of rust in very little time since opening (not to mention moist ones). I’ve recently received a 5 grams tin of IHT 22 and the damned little tin is what’s keeping me from pinching more often. They should shift to screw top tis as soon as possible. They probably won’t, but I can’t understand why as some promotional photos in their website seem to discover the existence of better tins in a not so remote past of the company. Besides that, they are also horrible in terms of design, what’s fairly surprising seeing that they kept the beauty and usefulness of the Fribourg and Treyer tins after acquisition…
Toque tins when you have beaten them up a big are literally impossible to reopen. 6 Photo ones are a little better but the little groove is just a little too far down to get the right leverage first time. WOS is still the worst of them all though, nasty little things.
WoS, I once had to PEEL the lid off.
Another vote for the WoS tins, having a lot of good alternatives in the market I can´t understand why they keep using them…