Inside the airplane hanger shaped factory it sounds like a tunnel with a roaring locomotive. Man-sized bundles of raw, yellowish fiber are fed into machines that shred and sort the matted, stringy fibers. These are rolled into coils and dumped into multicolored fifty-five gallon drums, manhandled by sweating, burly workers onto an overhead conveyer that carries them, swaying and creaking, to the next level of separating machines that reduce the fiber to finer strands. As it moves up the chain in fineness, so does the air of the factory. At first the suspended fine dust, is like a light fog.
Workers wear bandannas over their noses and mouths.
By the end of the process, the air is breathable. At the last thrasher, metal teeth have sorted the tangled web into distinct strands of what will become twine, rope or burlap bags. It is labor intensive, as workers must constantly monitor the machines and often stop them in order to straighten out the wiry strands. After the stranding process is complete, the individual strands are fed into machines that wind them around to the desired thickness. I couldn't count the number of strands used to make the hawsers for ships.