San Antonio light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1911-1993, 1926-04-29
Machines Replace Men in
+, Handling Flax at
= Ford's Factory.

va W. aASeAANNA
that have come down from
as far back as anyone car
discover, hand work pre-.
dominates in flax. The valu.
able fibre of the plant is on
the outside of the stalk sur.
rounding the woody core,
and it has always been con.
sidered out Of the question
to NOW. flax as one would NOV wheat,
for it is essential to keep the stalks
parallel, else the subsequent hand
operations will be hampered.
Also, cutting flax was supposed to
leave too much valuable stalk attach
ed to the root in the ground. There
fore, the foreign practice is to pull
by hand and afterwards, while the
crop is on the ground, to comb out
the seeds. A deal of the valuable
seed is lost.
Thus, right at the beginning under
the old methods, we have two expen-
sive and wasteful hand operations
the pulling and what is called the
ripping" We experimental with a
rather intricate pulling machine but
found it was not worth while and that
we could do better cutting very close to
the ground. In our mechanical pro-
cess it is not necessary to keep the
stalks parallel after they are cut, and
it is cheaper to waste a few seeds
than to use hand labor. Therefore we
harvested it by machinery, leaving
the seeds on the stalks.
The next operation in the old style
is what is called "retting," that is,
rotting.. The usual method is to tie
the stalks into sheaves and put them
under water for some weeks with
weights on top to keep them from
drifting away. When the stalks have
sufficiently rotted, the sheaves are
taken out and dried in the sun. This
is all hand work and extremely I'M
pleasant, dirty work because the rot
ting flax gives out an almost unbear-
able odor. 1t is a matter Of great
judgment to discover exactly the right
kind of water for rotting and also to
know when to stop the process. The
next operation, under the old meth.
DDS, is the most tedious, wasteful and
expensive of all. This is known az
Scratching" by which the fiber is
separated from the woody core.
Under the method we have devel-
oped, all these expensive hand opera
lions are done away with. After cut
ting, we leave the stalks on the
ground for some weeks; then we
gather them up and bale them, just
as though they we're hay. Instead Of
drying the retted flax in the sun, We
pass it through an. oven on a con-
veyor, and this convcyor delivers the
conditioned flax to what we call a
ginning machine and which is the
very heart of our process because it
entirely replaces the old hand process
of stripping the fiber.
The gin has six sections running at
various speeds with fluted rolls and
combing rolls-there is no use going
into the technical details. The upshot
of 1t 10 that this machine mechanical
ly takes out all of the seeds and
stalks and leaves US a fiber which is,
in part, what is called Zine flax" y
and, in part, stow"
INTELLIGENT" MACHINES.
There is a saving both in labor
and in recovery. These gins. do not
care how the stalks feed into them,
90 it is no longer necessary to bother
about keeping the stalks parallel.
IL Is calculated that one machine
working eight hours and tended by
two men will scutch as much flax as
10 men working by hand through a
12-bour day..
This flax is now being spun into
two grades Of linen, one coarse cloth
and the other fine cloth. This is
done on standard equipment which we
bought abroad, but our men have al
ready managed to make some improve
ments on this machinery and others