ABSTRACT

Toothed saws have been used to separate cotton fiber from the seed for over 200 years. There have been many saw tooth designs developed over the years. Most of these designs were developed by trial and error. A complete and scientific analysis of tooth design has never been done. It is not known whether the optimum saw tooth design has been found, particularly for modern upland varieties. Initial laboratory ginning evaluations of some modern gin saw teeth has shown differences between designs in both ginning rate and average fiber length and length uniformity measurements. Further work remains to be done, both in the ginning laboratory and the textile mill, to document and explain these differences, and to then optimize the gin saw tooth design.