Methods of Beating Fiber
All material for papermaking, whether you choose cloth, plant fiber, or paper to be recycled, needs to treated to separate the fibers. Beating is the fastest and most common way to do so. The earliest papermakers probably beat their material by hand with a stick (as is still done in some traditional forms of Japanese papermaking), by the use of simple mortar and pestle equipment, or by the use of animal-power (used to pull a stone wheel continuously through a circular stone trough, for example). More advanced technology for beating material for papermaking came with the introduction of stampers, which range from foot-powered adaptations of the mortar and pestle design to huge mechanical devices, with stamper heads of different degrees of coarseness in adjacent troughs for processing the material in stages. In the European mills of the middle ages and Renaissance, papermakers constructed large, elaborate, water-powered stamping mills to process a considerable amount of cloth into pulp for papermaking, with clever features like rinse water running through the troughs where the fiber was being beaten to remove waste materials throughout the process.
In the late 17th century, the Dutch invented a mechanical device known as the Hollander beater. Hollanders are still used by hand papermakers today, although the machine-made paper industry has mostly switched to more chemical ways of breaking down material for papermaking. Hollanders come in different designs, but all basically consist of an oblong trough with rounded ends in which water and the material being beaten circulate; a rotating cylinder with dull metal blades (known as the roll); and a bedplate of raised dull metal blades in the bottom of the trough, underneath the roll. The roll turns in close proximity to the bedplate and the material being beaten is forced between the blades, through the circular movement of the water. Either the bedplate or the roll are adjustable and one of them is sometimes moveable, which allows for variations in the thickness and toughness of the material being processed. Some Hollanders even have a device for removing waste water so that the fiber can be more effectively rinsed as it is being beaten.
