Fig. 2.—CUTTING RAGS.
The sorting is done by women and children in a large room; each sorter stands before a table frame, covered at the top with wire cloth, containing about nine meshes to the square inch. To this frame a long steel blade is attached, in a slanting position, as shown in Fig. 2; and the sorter divides the rags into shreds by drawing them against the sharp edge of this knife; a good deal of the dust which is shaken out in this operation falls through the wire-cloth into a box beneath. The sections of rag are thrown into the compartments of the frame, according to their fineness. In importing rags, some attention is paid to their quality by the foreign dealers, so that each bale is tolerably uniform. Formerly, this was not the case, and in sorting a bale the woman had a piece of pasteboard hung from her girdle and extended on her knees, upon which with a long sharp knife she unripped seams and stitches, and scraped off any adhering dirt. The rags were sorted, according to their fineness, into the superfine, the fine, the stitches of the fine, the middling, the seams and stitches of the middling, and the coarse. These divisions are more or less observed at the present day. The very coarse parts are rejected or laid aside for making white-brown paper.
The sorted rags are washed with hot water and alkali, in an apparatus formed exactly on the principle of the bucking keirs or puffers, described under BLEACHING (June number, 1852); or the washing is performed at one of the mills or engines described below.
The rags are ground into pulp in mills, now made sufficiently powerful to reduce the strongest and toughest rags. Formerly, before the invention of mills, or when they were of much less power, it was customary to pile the rags in large stone vats, and leave them for a month or six weeks with frequent stirring and watering to ferment or rot, by which means the fibres became sufficiently loose to be reduced to pulp by pounding in wooden mortars with stampers.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 4.