With the perfection of cigar-making machinery within the present century, 
the evolution of the industry into fewer and larger establishments has been 
rapid. In the last 20 years alone, the number of factories producing cigars 
has dwindled from 4,000 to about 500, and production has increased from 5 to 
over 7 billion. All cigars, except those of the very finest grades, are now 
made by machines. 
There are three components of the cigar--filler, binder, and wrapper. For 
the manufacture of some cigars, imported leaf is used for part or all of the 
cigar. However, over two-thirds of the cigar leaf used in the industry is do- 
mestically grown. Cigar leaf is first stemmed; that is, the large or tough 
stems are removed, before it goes into the manufacturing process. 
Reconstituted tobacco sheet. A comparatively recent development in the 
industry is the introduction of the use of a new tobacco form, "reconstituted 
sheet," as a substitute for natural cigar binders. 
In manufacturing this material for binders, tobacco is ground into a fine 
powder, or flour, mixed with a cohesive agent, and rolled into a flat sheet of 
uniform thickness and quality. The moisture is controlled throughout all the 
various stages of the production, and the material is so made that not only 
have the taste and aroma of the natural leaf been preserved, but the burning 
quality has been improved. 
The use of reconstituted sheet binder effects a substantial savings both 
in leaf and labor costs. Natural leaf binders have to be nearly perfect, and 
are therefore costly. When these are used, they are first stemmed, and the 
stems discarded. Generally each half of a stemmed leaf will yield two to three 
binder pieces and the trimmings go largely into the manufacture of scrap chew 
ing, which is a lower value outlet for the leaf. In tobacco sheet, all the 
binder leaves are used, even though they may be broken or damaged, and the 
stems are not removed. There is no waste or trimmings in cutting the binder, 
as it is cut to a parallelogram shape, which uses all the sheet. 
The savings in labor cost, as well as in leaf cost, is also an important 
factor in the development of this processed sheet for cigar-binder purposes. 
Natural binders must be hand-stamped and hand-fed into the cigarmaking machine 
but the sheet is fed automatically from a spool, thus reducing the required 
number of workers from 2 to 1 on most machines (fig. 43). 
At present the sheet has only a very limited use as wrappers, but the po- 
tential saving in this area, also, is considerable, both in leaf and labor 
costs. 
Nearly all cigars today are made by machine. The filler tobacco is first 
fed into a hopper’ to make the core or center part of the cigar. This filler 
may be made of long-shredded fragments of leaves, the length of the cigar, or 
of short-shredded pieces bunched together. The bulk of cigars today are made 
with short filler. The filler portion is blended and shaped, and the binder, 
either natural or sheet, cut and wrapped around it. Next, the wrapper is cut 
and applied and the end sealed. The finished cigar is finally checked by an 
operator. Machines can turn out cigars at the rate of 800 to 900 per hour. 
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