Linseed oil.—One of the first commercial manu facturing uses to which flax was put in America was based on the oil contained in the seed. The demand for linseed oil, as it is called, and the in dustry have developed rapidly, until an oil-manu facturing plant today entails an investment of a million or more dollars and employs hundreds of men.
The supply of flax for the oil-mill is shipped mostly from the local elevators, and stands in the transfer yards until graded by the State Inspec Lion Department. In the meantime, it is bargained for by the various firms. The cars are then side tracked to the mills, where the mill hands unload into their elevators. Once in the elevator bins, the flax is spouted into the hoppers of large clean ers, which by means of their many shakes and sieves separate the flax from the straw, dust, weeds and other seeds. The foreign seeds are sold for various purposes. The flax is elevated from the cleaner to a vertical system of five large rolls or breaks ; the upper ones barely crush the ber ries, while the lower ones reduce them to a fine meal, which is carried to large cookers that temper it and heat it to 160° to 200°. Some seeds need more moisture, others have too much. The tempering adds to or takes from the grain enough moisture to bring it to a common temper. From the cookers the hot meal is drawn into a conveyor that distributes it evenly in a mould about 12 x 20 x 21 inches. To hold the meal after these moulds are removed, a camel's-hair cloth is placed around it. The moulds or forms are placed in a hydraulic press and subjected to a pressure of 3,500 pounds per square inch. The oil is squeezed out and flows into a small sluice tank to rid it of the finest meal particles. It then goes to the large tank or to the refining tanks. From these the various grades of oil are drawn off into original packages (barrels, etc.) for market.
The grades of oil are named according to a sys tem peculiar to each mill. Thus, the same grade of oil may have two or more names as it is put out from two or more mills. The oils are used for a variety of purposes, from the making of patent leather shoes to paints.
processes employed in making the various products from flax fiber are too long to be described in detail. The old methods followed by
our fathers and mothers, as recently as 1870, were crude, but were apace with the progress of other industries at that time. A half-acre or an acre was the extent of the flax-field, but each farmer grew some flax for making the family's "homespun." The flax was pulled, retted, hackeled, spun and woven by hand. Today, the hand labor is elimi nated almost entirely. In fact, it is difficult to get men to do any of the hard work for which ma chinery has been invented. When cut, if the flax is stood up in shocks, there is damage done to the stalks where they touch the moist soil.
After harvesting, the seed is threshed from the straw. This is done in some instances by holding the heads of the bundles in the cylinder of the threshing machine. In others, the heads are cut from the stalks in the process of breaking and are threshed in a separate device. In olden days, the seed was pounded out by whipping the "hand" (a handful) over a barrel, or it was "rippled," that is, drawn through a coarse comb.
Flax grown for fiber in this country is threshed by passing the heads repeatedly between rapidly revolving cylinders or belt pulleys, the seed being afterward cleaned with fanning-mills. Special threshing machines are used at the two hinder twine factories.
In preparing the fiber for weaving, the straw must be passed through a process of decay, called retting. This loosens the outer covering and shives (the inner or woody part of the plant) from the bast fibers and makes the separation of the fiber easy. The retting is accomplished in two ways (1) By or dew-retting, i. e., spreading the flax on the ground in an open field or pasture ; (2) by placing the bundles in slow-flowing streams or pools (Fig. 410). The latter is the true way of retting, makes a whiter, better fiber and is much quicker. The steeping in this way acts constantly on the mucilage that holds the fiber and wood to gether. Rain-water is said to be best, although river-water is most commonly used. One or two weeks is sufficient time for pool-retting, while many weeks are often necessary properly to dew-ret.