Copyright 2007

Back in the 1970's I build a handmade paper plant for the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. The project was intended to use small businesses to help people in drug rehabilitation. Here are a few pictures and ideas from that project.

The key piece of equipment was a Hollander Beater that converts small pieces of cloth into paper pulp. The beater I build was made of wood with a steal drum and chevron baseplate. The wood for the tank was mahogany and I put incise carvings along the edge of the base. This design was based on a beater from The Twinrocker Paper Company.

Below is a discussion the key parts of this paper plant with a few pictures. I include notes on how the parts are used and how they were built. Unfortunately the pictures are just ones I happen to still have around.

I am also currently working on designs for the following equipment to be available over the web:

• Wet Press (new build)
• Paper Mold and Deckle (new build)
• Paper Couch (new build)
• Paper mold mesh loom (under development)
• Paper Vat (under development)

We do not plan to provide beater plans at this time due to safety concerns.

Anyone interested in the construction of handmade paper equipment should fell free to drop me an e-mail for more details.

The Process

The handmade paper process starts with old rags and ends up with art paper:

1. Making the cloth squares -- Old clothing is sorted for cotton, linen, and silk It is then sorted by color, and the buttons and zippers are removed. The pieces are laid out on a cutting table to make a stack about 2 inches thick. The stack is then cut into one inch squares with a power cloth cutter. This tool looks a little like a kitchen beater but has a sharp wheel that cuts the cloth.
   

2. Making the Pulp -- Cloth squares are added to water in the Hollander Beater. They are beaten for about 20 minutes to create paper pulp.
   
   

3. Making Paper -- The paper pulp is placed in a vat with more water. The mold is ducked under the water and brought straight up. This traps a layer of pulp on the brass screen on the top of the mold. A mold or deckle is then removed leaving a course edge to the pulp layer.
   
4. Transferring the paper -- The paper is removed from the mold by rolling it over a piece of wool cloth laid on a curved table called a couch.
5. Pressing out the water -- The stack of new paper and wool cloth is transferred to a wet press and the excess water pressed out.

6. Drying -- The new paper is then laid out on racks to dry.

7. Dry pressing -- The dry paper is put through the press again with pieces of flat sheet aluminum between them to flatten and compress them.




Hollander Beater

The Hollander Beater is the show piece of the operation. It beats squares of cloth into paper pulp. It has a oval tank on top covered with a lid. The tank is build into a heavy wooden table. Below the table is a solid support mold that holes a walking beam, a jack, and a motor. It gets its name because this is the first pulping machine design efficient enough to be run with a windmill.



The key mechanical parts are a steel drum with flat metal bars on it that beat against a metal baseplate with similar bars. In actuarially they two parts do not quite touch. The bars on the baseplate are bent in a chevron design so that it is impossible for the drum bars to fall between the baseplate bars.

The drum is fixed in place and the baseplate is jacked up from underneath. This is by far the simplest way to build a Hollander. The area around the baseplate is sealed with a piece of neoprene and cloth conveyer belt material. The base plate is mounted to an oak working beam and moved up with a car jack.

Building a Hollander Beater is a major project and is not to be taken on without a budget of at least $800.00 (the final cost could be closer to $1200.00). I would be happy to help help in such a project, but the beater is much to big and heavy for me to build and ship.




molds

The mold is the most difficult woodworking challenge for the paper plant. It is a box made from mahogany with a brass screen on top. The corners of the box are dovetailed. A brass screen covers the top. The screen is supported with a series of wooden tear drop shaped slats beneath it. On top is a deckle of this that looks like a picture frame but has a very complex corner joint.



The top of the mold may be covered with wire mesh in either brass or stainless steel. The most artistic covering is a hand woven brass wires with heavy straight wires for the weft and fine brass wires for the warp. A simple handmade mesh loom helps with this weaving.

It is not hard to fashion watermarks out of brass wire and attach them to the molds.

I would greatly enjoy building paper molds again. And, they are light enough to ship.




Wet Press

The press has a fixed top plate and bottom plate that is moved up with a hydraulic jack. The top and bottom cross beams are oak, but had to reinforced with steel channel iron. The major challenge of the design is to handle the water as it comes off the paper.

Paper wet presses are not difficult to build, but they are too heavy to ship. I would be happy to provide design if you wish to build one locally.




Other Equipment

There a number of pieces of support equipment that can be build out of wood:

• A cutting table to cut up the old cloth with a power tool
• Storage boxes for the cloth squares
  
• Vats for dipping the molds into the paper pulp
  
• A couch for transferring the paper off the mold
• Drying racks for the new paper