FIRE-WOOD MANUFACTURE. The manufacture of such an article as fire-wood would only be thought of in a large and po pulous city, far distant from woodland and copses. The neat appearance of our London bundles and net works and wheels of fire. wood has to this day an air of strangeness to country people.
The bundles of fire-wood, largely used in London, and having a cylindrical shape, are made with simple apparatus. The pieces of wood, well dried, are cut by saws into blocks about six inches long, and these blocks are chopped up to the requisite degree of thinness. A sufficient number of small sticks to form one bundle are placed within a kind of hoop, and confined there until a piece of tarred string is firmly bound round them.
The Patent fire-wood of recent times assumes two forms—the wheel and the gridiron. In the first form a number of small pieces are arranged somewhat like a wheel, and bound into that form by string. In the gridiron form the pieces are first notched or dove tailed, by a machine, and made to fit very tightly into each other. Both forms have a few fragments of shavings, and a slight coat ing of resin on one side, to facilitate their ignition.
The manufacture of the cylindrical bundles of fire-wood is deemed sufficiently important to warrant the erection of an extensive factory at Bow, where steam-power is employed to work an ingenious series of machines recently patented by Messrs. Thompson and Elms.
There are two machines, for cutting and for binding. The cutting•machine has a large wheel, on the periphery of which are eight equidistant cutters. An endless band pas sing over the rollers, acts as a feeder to these cutters. The billets of wood are cut by the saw into blocks, about six inches long; and these blocks are ranged, sido by side, on the feeding-band, with the grain of the wood perpendicular. As the feeding band travels on, these blocks are brought one by one to a spot where the cutters may act upon them : and they are speedily cut up into slices or flat pieces. These slices are re-arranged on the feeding-band, side by side, but in such a posi tion that they may be cut up into splints or square sticks. These splints are much more regular in form than those produced by the old method of chopping. The splints are next taken to the binding-machine. They are placed in a kind of hopper, through which they descend into a horizontal cylinder, and a plunger or piston here compresses them, retains them at one end while the bundle is being bound with string, and then forces the bundle out of the cylinder.