PROJECTED REVIVAL OF THE FLAX INDUSTRY 625 



said that these appliances have been entirely superseded 

 wherever the flax industry has attained a fairly high level. 



Although the principle of the modern machines is much the 

 same as the old-fashioned ones, the " breaker " is now made with 

 many (eight or ten) pairs of metal rollers, some of which are 

 smooth to crush the straw flat, followed by many other pairs of 

 grooved rollers differently fluted : the object being to break up 

 the woody part of the stem and to remove mechanically as much 

 of it as possible at that stage without injuring the fibre. These 

 machines are driven by water, steam or other motive power and 

 ordinarily form part of the equipment of a flax-cleaning mill. 

 The straw is fed into the breaker at one end and received at the 

 other end by lads who handle the material carefully and lay 

 the broken straw in heaps ready for the cleaners. 



After coming from the " breaker," the broken-up woody part 

 of the straw — the shove— is separated from the fibre by a 

 mechanical beating operation known as scutching and, save 

 for some details, this is conducted on the principle of submitting 

 handfuls of broken straw to a beating by wooden blades which 

 are either wielded by the hand or are fixed to a rotating wheel. 



As a household industry, scutching and cleaning fibre by 

 hand or by hand-driven machinery have quite disappeared 

 except in Russia and some of the more rural parts of Belgium. 

 These simple methods, which admit of varying the treatment at 

 will to suit the particular material dealt with, have much in 

 their favour from the point of view of preparing good fibre : 

 they have, however, been superseded for economic reasons. 



The construction of a scutch mill is such that the revolving 

 beaters pass close in front of a rigid upright " stock " over 

 which the flax is firmly held and submitted to rapid beating in 

 a downward direction. The ease with which flax is scutched 

 depends largely upon whether the straw has been well or under- 

 retted : in Belgium, where flax is well retted, the scutching 

 blades are lightly fashioned and the rotating wheel carries more 

 blades than in Ireland, where flax is more often under-retted. 



This briefly describes the operation of scutching as carried out 

 almost universally. The methods and appliances are primitive 

 and the treatment accorded the fibre is severe, yet more recent and 

 apparently improved devices for removing the shove have met 

 with but slight attention from those engaged in scutching. 



In addition to the operations of retting which have been 



