If you have decent quality kief, you can press it; by hand, in a press, etc.
The Lebanese, when pressing, often used a cloth bag under a wide-mouth press with no sides and limited heat, if heat is necessary at all.
Their older presses were with 'arms' and often had 2-3 people stabilizing the press with feet, etc, and reefing on those arms of a hand crank press.
If heat was applied, it was limited, and the wide-plate press was sometimes heated with a hand-held butane torch.
We mostly liked their stuff made that way..
I use a mold/form for mine with the heavy hydraulic jack, simply because I use Reynold's turkey roasting bags cut and folded into small 'pockets' and the mold, if used correctly, and the pouches are put together with just enough slack, keeps the pouch fom exploding and making a mess inside the mold.
Press on!! Or hand press.
I've also taken a small pouch of the roasting bags, placed them inside my shoe, under my heel, and sort of met the 2 processes somewhere in the middle; somewhere between hand pressed and a press.
