10127804Flax Scutching Turbine - Reviving Bio-regional Flax ProcessingClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKThe linen industry including all the machinery and a lot of the knowledge, disappeared from the UK in the post WW2 period. But there is renewed interest in bringing it back. Vicky Putler of Flax Project CIC, has been growing flax since 2021, processing the straw by hand and also sending it abroad for processing. In order to scale this up in any way the infrastructure needs to be developed. Flax Project CIC aims to do this and so create a processing hub in the South West peninsula enabling the growing of flax to be rolled out to other farmers/growers. Whilst single user manual processing machines can be still be sourced today, smaller scale high-volume mechanised equipment, such as that used across the flax growing regions in Northwest Europe in the nineteenth century (including Southwest England), is no longer available. RBFP seeks to prototype a smaller scale flax scutching turbine. This turbine links two small-scale machines for the key stages in this processing sequence: _breaking_ and _scutching_. The breaking machine uses a series of interlocking cogged or reeded rollers to crimp and crush the husks of the flax stems; The scutching machine uses interleaved paddled rollers to scrape the husks loose from the core fibres. This releases the long core fibres used to be combed and prepared for spinning into yarn. The two machines may be assembled in combination; the result is called a _scutching turbine_. Vicky Putler of Flax Project CIC has been undertaking research on the construction and operation of these machines, using archive materials, including moving image and photograph collections (see below). Several hand machines have been constructed and a mechanical machine has been repurposed. Using this research and experience gained from manual processing, the project team will construct a working prototype of a suitably sized scutching turbine, to undertake proof-of-concept tests for localised flax processing. The iterative prototypes will be created through direct construction and the commissioning of the more complex specific engineered parts. This will enable a major part of the processing to be conducted in house, making the production of linen more efficient and also providing an income stream by providing processing services to other flax growers.