﻿EVAPORATION OF FRUITS. 



17 



the worktable below. The bleacher is swung from the rafters 6^ 

 feet above the floor, so that there is headroom to enter the kilns. It 

 discharges fruit directly into the hopper of the slicer which stands 

 immediately beneath the end of the bleacher. The plan of the second 

 floor and the location and size of the bleacher are shown in Figure 

 7. The floor of the conditioning room is level with the drying floors 

 of the kilns, in order to facilitate handling the material. The floors 

 of the workrooms should be made of a good quality of dressed. 

 matched flooring, carefully laid to facilitate cleaning. As they are 

 required to bear considerable weight, they may well be double. A 

 stairway is provided between the first and second floors. The loca- 



Fig. 7. — Second-floor plan of a 4-kiln drying plant. The drying floor and workroom are 

 on the same level. The bleacher is hung from the rafters with sufficient headroom for 

 passing into the kiln. 



tion of the windows and doors and the size of the various openings 

 are shown in Figures 4 and 7. 



THE APPLE-DRYING WORKROOM AND ITS EQUIPMENT. 



Equipment necessary in the workroom. — The essential equipment 

 of the workroom of an apple-drying plant includes a washing tank 

 with an adequate supply of fresh water, a grader, a worktable 

 equipped with belt conveyors for carding pared apples and waste, 

 peeling machines, elevators for carrying pared apples and waste 

 to the second floor, elevated bins with gravity chutes for supplying 

 unpared apples to the worktable, the bleacher (a closed box with a 

 slat-and-chain conveyor and a stove for burning sulphur), the 

 slicer, a chopper for working up apples too small or soft to be profit- 

 ably made into pared stock, shafting, belting, pulleys, and an electric 

 motor or a gasoline engine to operate the machinery, low, broad- 

 wheeled hand trucks for moving prepared fruit from the slicer to 

 the kilns and from kilns to the conditioning room, a conditioning 

 room screened to exclude insects and provided with partitions or 

 bins for keeping the various grades of stock separate, baskets, trim- 

 ming knives, wooden shovels, tools for adjusting and repairing ma- 

 chines, and a supply of spare parts of such equipment as is subject 



25497°— 23 3 



