xm, A, 6 King: Philippine Coir and Coir Cordage 291 



seemed as though the surface had been polished. However, not 

 all of the fiber was so thoroughly cleaned. Some was contam- 

 inated with the tough epidermal tissue which was present in 

 sufficient quantities to bind the filaments together. 



The retted fiber was not so clean as that extracted mechan- 

 ically and therefore had a rough appearance. It was not only 

 contaminated with adherent pulp and leathery epidermal tissue, 

 which often bound the filaments into loose bundles, but was also 

 cluttered with appreciable quantities of loose waste material that 

 fell out largely in the form of dust on untwisting the rope. 

 This waste material, which consisted of pulp, dirt, short fibers, 

 and tow, increases both bulk and weight, but does not add to 

 the strength of the rope. 



There is a marked difference in color between the two samples 

 of coir. The retted fiber is buckhorn brown and the machine- 

 cleaned fiber is hazel. ^° Hazel is the true color of the filaments, 

 and the buckhorn brown color of the retted fiber is due to a 

 thin film of tissue from the husks that the cleaning process failed 

 to remove. Simply passing the filament several times between 

 the thumb nail and the tip of the index finger will remove this 

 coating of pulp, when the true hazel color appears. 



Many of the machine-extracted filaments have frayed and 

 split ends, and sometimes the tips are broken off completely, ap- 

 parently due to the spiked drum that extracted the fiber from 

 the husks. These injured ends reduce the effective length of 

 the already short filaments, and must be cut off before they can 

 be subjected to tensile test, in order to avoid rupture which 

 would inevitably occur in the jaws of the testing machine. 



Dimensions of coir filaments. — A series of measurements made 

 of thirty-nine representative machine-cleaned filaments shows 

 an average length of 245 millimeters, of which the minimum is 

 174 and the maximum 299 millimeters. Measurements of fifty- 

 three different retted filaments show an average length of 228 

 millimeters, of which the minimum and maximum lengths are 

 111 and 290 millimeters, respectively. Additional measure- 

 ments of retted and machine-cleaned filaments are given in 

 Tables I and II. The cross-sectional dimensions were obtained 

 by a micrometer caliper registering to the thousandth part of 

 an inch. In the case of the fine filaments that are comparatively 

 soft and yielding, especial care was exercised to obtain trust- 

 worthy measurements. 



" Ridgway, R., Color Standards and Color Nomenclature. Published by 

 the author in Washington, D. C. (1912). Plates XIV and XV. 



