CHAPTER XII 



SCUTCHING 



106. Scutching Operations. 107. Hand Scutching. 108. Flax 

 Straw Butting Machines. 109. Breaking the Dry Flax Straw. 1 10. 

 Breaking Boilers. 111. Fluted Breaking Rollers. 112. Horner's 

 Skeleton Drums. 113. Machine Scutching. 114. Principle of 

 Scutching and Action of Mechanism. 115. Buffing and Cleaning. 

 116. Details of Scutching Wheels. 117. Varieties of Adjustment of 

 Blades to Stock. 118. The Liddell Automatic Grip. 119. The 

 Automatic Scutcher. 120. Principle and Operation of Automatic 

 Scutching. 



106. Scutching Operations. The scutching of flax is the 

 mechanical and final operation designed to prepare and fit 

 the raw material for the market. 



The desired object is to break the internal pith or " boon " 

 and remove it completely from the fibres with as little injury 

 to them as possible. Fig. 74 shows a portion of a scutch mill 

 together with several stacks of dry retted straw ready for 

 scutching. 



Three operations are necessary to complete the process of 

 modern scutching. These include 



(a) Breaking, crushing, bruising or " crimping " the flax 

 straw. 



(b) Buffing or breaking the boon. 



(c) The cleaning or finishing operation. 



A " stewart " flax straw butting machine is sometimes advan- 

 tageously used in conjunction with the rolling machine. A 

 photograph of both these machines is shown at Fig. 75. 



107. Hand Scutching. In the hand-scutching days and 

 districts, the dry retted straw was broken or bruised with a 

 wooden mallet, or by other primitive means. A more effective 

 method was introduced, when a single pair of indented or fluted 

 hard wood rollers were constructed and turned by hand, 

 whilst the flax passed through and was broken. A vertical 



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