Accordingly, the first thing that happens is that the hoops are cut, the bagging removed, and the cotton thrown by hand into the feed-apron of the bale-breaker. This machine does nothing more than to pick the compressed cotton apart and deliver it in tufts about the size of a handfull on a belt conveyor.
The Opener
The travelling belt or feeder delivers these bunches of cotton into machines called Openers, which simply repeat the operation of the bale-breaker on a more thorough scale, reducing the large tufts into many smaller ones. These small pieces are dropped into an air chute and drawn along parallel rods up to the picker room. During transit in the trunk much of the heavier dirt falls between the rods and is removed.
In the most recent installations larger bale-breakers are used which reduce the cotton to small tufts and deliver through an air pipe to a condenser in the picker-room. The condenser either empties into bins or else on to the automatic feed of the breaker-pickers.
Bale Breakers
Pickers Remove Coarse Dirt
As the tufts come out of the chute they fall into the first of three machines known as Pickers, whose function is to beat out the coarser impurities and deliver the cotton in rolls of batting called laps. In the first, or breaker-picker the tufts are thoroughly whirled and pounded over grid-bars by rollers armed with short flail-like projections, and then compressed into a continuous sheet or lap of a given weight per yard, which is wound on a large spool and delivered to the second, or intermediate picker. This machine practically repeats the operation only that it combines four laps from the first picker into one which it hands over to the last, or finisher picker. The latter again takes four intermediate laps and forms them into one sheet of fairly clean cotton, containing very little dirt or seed, but still fairly filled with small particles of leaf. In these preliminary operations the cotton has lost about five per cent. of its weight.
Picker Room