Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1889 — Clothes-Pins. [ARTICLE]

Clothes-Pins.

Where do all the clotlies-pins go? Innumerable dozens of them are tlowing out into the world continuously from the factories, and a single expert packer handles 72,000 of them in a day, packing 100 boxes at a cent a box. They are made of ash, beech, birch and maple. The logs are cut into lengths of 31 inches, these art? sawed into blocks, the blocks into sticks and thej,sticks into shorter ones, the length of the clothes-pin, about 5| inches. These are fed into a lathe by an endless belt The lathe turns them into shape and passes them along by a turn-table to a saw which cuts out the slot Wiyjn the machine is through w,ith them it drops them into a box or barrel. The pin-s are then dried in a drying house and then put, 20 to 40 bushels at once, into a slowly revolving cylinder, and the friction caused b}' their tumbling about in this cylinder poli-lies them. A single plant for making clothes pins costs from t<7,oiM to £12,000. Ent what becomes of the pins?