As soon as a "heater" is ready to be emptied, the meal is taken out
and put into six hair sacks, corresponding to the six pans in the
press. There are six hair mats about one foot wide and six long, one
side of each being coated with leather. The hair mat is about an inch
thick. Now the hair sack, containing ten and a half to eleven pounds
of heated steaming meal, is placed on one end of the mat, and the meal
distributed so as to make a pad or cushion of uniform thickness. The
pad of meal is not quite three feet long, a foot wide, and three
inches thick, and the hair mat is folded over, sandwiching the pad and
leaving the leather coating of the pad outside. In this form the six
loads are put into the six pans, and by means of a powerful hydraulic
press the pans are slowly pressed together. The oil begins trickling
out at the side, slowly at first, and then suddenly it begins running
freely. The pressure on the "loads" is 350 tons. After being pressed
about five minutes, the pressure is eased off and the "loads" taken
out. What had been a mushy pad three inches thick is a hard, compact
cake about three-quarters of an inch thick, and the sack is literally
glued to the cake. The crude oil has a reddish muddy color as it runs
into the tanks.
To one side were lying great heaps of sacks of yellowish meal--the
cakes which have been broken and ground up into meal. That, as
explained above, forms the body of all fertilizers. The following is a
summary of the work for the eight months' season at the Atlanta mills:
Fifteen thousand tons of seed used give:
Fifteen million pounds of hull.
Ten million three hundred and thirty-one thousand two hundred and
fifty pounds of meal.
Four million six hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and
fifty pounds of oil.
Three hundred thousand pounds of lint cotton.
The meal is worth at the rate of $6 for 700 pounds, or $88,603.58.
The oil is worth thirty cents a gallon, or seven and a half pounds, or
$186,750.
The lint is worth $18,000, making a total of $293,353, and that
doesn't include the 15,000,000 pounds of hull.--_Atlanta
Constitution._
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