Development and Experiment on a Rice Seed Rope Twisting Machine

A prototype of rice seeds rope twisting machine was designed. The prototype consisted of 3 parts, which were a seeds metering mechanism by which the seeds were dropped at a strip of 2 cm width paper (unwoven cloth) keeping the distance of 2.5~3cm between the seeds, a seeds rope twisting mechanism by which the seeds were twisted in the paper strip turned into a rope and a rolling rope mechanism by which the twisted paper made seed ropes were rolled up. At the time that the seeds were planted, the seed ropes were hanged on the two sides of the designed seed rope rolling out machine and one end of the rope was fixed at the land side, the seed rope rolling out machine moved by a tractor or an manpower, along with the moving of the machine the paper made seed ropes were laid in the ditches which were opened by the coulters of the machine and then the seed ropes were covered by the sealers of the machine. Experiments results showed that the performance parameters such as the average distance between the rice seed hills was 2.5 cm, the ratio of hills without any seed to the total hills was 1.5%, the average seed number per hill was 1.48 and the rolling number of the paper per unit length was 43 m-1, have achieve the basic design purpose. But rope-rolling speed was only 0.8 m?s-1 it should be improved. The most remarkable advantages of rice direct sowing using the paper made seed rope were that a big part of rice direct sowing were done in factory.