Retford Paper Mill

I visited Retford Board Mill in the early 1980s with John Baker, Staper manager and interim APM East Mill technical manager. The single machine was making woodchip wallpaper. it was a twin wire machine – two separate fourdrinier wires, the upper one running contrary to the bottom one which I recall was set rather low down, almost level with the floor. A secondary flow box delivered the woodchip suspension onto the lower sheet (over the vacuum boxes?) before the sheet from the upper wire was couched and brought down on top of the lower layer and chips, the laminate then passed to the presses. Drive was by line shaft.

A curious feature of the stock prep area were the stock chests, deep tile lined tanks with an agitator resembling a 5 bar gate rotating on a horizontal axis. At one end of the agitator shaft a wheel with cups or buckets around the circumference scooped stuff out of the chest and discharged into a launder, a weir controlled forward flow to the machine and the excess returned to the chest. It resembled some sort of mediaeval irrigation system.

Steam was raised in a small package boiler, with an automatic stoker, fed by small coal held in a silo, controlled according to steam demand.