1993 Volume 55 Issue 3 Pages 23-31
The purpose of this study is to develop a harvest machine capable of improving the quality of tea leaves. For this purpose, a selective tea-plucking system which is quite similar to the man-plucking method was studied.
This system has twin parallel plucking rolls which have a spiral shaped cut in opposite directions each other. The rolls take plucking action at a hole which is formed by spiral shaped cuts on the surface of rolls and continually moves from low to high position of rolls with while they rotate in opposite directions. In this paper, the relation between the size of the plucking hole and the state of plucked tea leaves was examined. The result showed that in order to decrease the damage of tea leaf and increase the function inducing tea shoot to the hole, one tea shoot must be plucked in one hole, and about 2.5mm of the hole diameter is required.
