The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-12-04
ANoTHER RAMIE MACHINE.
Given a Practical Test at Audubon
 Park Station.

Another test was made yesterday with the P Faure ramie decorticating ma chine recently erected at the Audubon Park Experiment Station. A large num- Der of people were present to witness the work of the machine, which was placed in operation about o'clock. and several runs of ramie were made through it. Some hemp and sisal were also tried in the machine, which appeared to work very satisfactorily, cleaning the fiber and separating it from the wood in a very thorough manner. The machine is not in- tended alone for ramie, but will separate the fiber in hemp, jute, cotton stalks and other fbPous woods. doing the work very completely, and turning out clean, strong and long fiber.
 Many ramie decorticating machines have been tried in the past, some twenty tests having been made at Audubon Park alone during the past decade, but up to this time none of them had proven pfac- tical or available owing to the cost of producing a merchantable fiber capable of being wrought into cloths or spun without undergoing another cleaning be- fore being used in the factory or weav- ing mill The result of this was the cost of the raw material in a state that 1t could be sused was too great, and the ramie cloth could not, therefore, com pete with cotton, linen or even silk, which the cloth much resembles. The difficulty which prevailed and prevented the thor ough cleaning of the fiber was the gum which adhered to the fiber after 1t had been separated from the wood and pulp. This had to be removed by a costly chemical process. The machine used yes terday effected this, however without chemicals, and after passing through two series of cylinders or beaters the ramie fiber came out at the end of the machine in long silk-like skeins, which had only to be rinsed in water to make them avail able for the factory.
 The ramie used in the experiments yes- terday was furnished by the Experiment Station. where it was grown and cut in the fields a short time before. It was stripped of the leaves. and bundles con- sisting of half a dozen stalks at a time were inserted in the machine and run through, coming out at the rear end cIeansed and without any gum on the tiber
 A few pieces of the wood adhered loose ly to the fiber, but when 1t was rinsed in fresh water these pieces dropped off readily.
 Messrs. Lafont and Merrill of this city. were present at the experiments and ex- Dlained the workings of the macRne to those interested. The ramie is first pass ed through a series of cylinders which separate the wood and gum from the !iher which is then conveyed on a cars fer 10 another series of three cylinders 1uown as beaters. which are run at dit Cereut rates uf speed the top one run ming with less speed than the middle one md the lower one running faster than the middle one. After passing through these cylinders. the fiber comes out of the machine in long strings, and after be- ng rinsed is ready for the factory. The representatives of the inventor claim that one of these machines has a capacity cf ten tons of green raInie per day of ten hours work yielding from 1000 to 100 pounds of cleaned ramie fiber
 The trials yesterday were not official out these will be had later on. The ma chine was run with a three-horse power engine. while ten machines can be run with tweuty-horse power engine.