MAKING PARACHUTES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 September 1941, Page 6

MAKING PARACHUTES

CATERPILLAR’S PART IN WAR EFFORT BIG QUANTITY OF SILK REQUIRED. MANUFACTURE IS EXACTING WORK. This is the story of how the gossamer from a caterpillar is made to float booted men to safety as they dangle in azure skies, writes Richard L. Strout, in the “Christian Science Monitor.’’ It is the story of how grasshoppers in American hayfields have a baneful effect upon the handiwork of the caterpillar, who meditatively munches his mulberry leaf in far-off Nippon.

It tells, too, why American housewives can’t get cheap “help” in the defence crisis.

It is the story of a parachute factory. You are standing in the airy, welllighted, capacious upper storey of a manufacturing company, makers of women’s dresses and garments in Washington, Indiana. As a sideline to women’s wear, the company has added a million-dollar parachute contract from the United States Government. There is something a good deal like wearing apparel in a parachute, and then again, there is a lot that is unlike. It has to be cut out after specified patterns. It has to be sewn. But on the other hand, take the matter of size. There are about 65 yards of silk in a parachute. In a man’s shirt there are two yards. That’s one difference. CHECKED AND RE-CHECKED. Another difference is that few garments have ever been made with quite such meticulous checking and cross-checking, examination and reexamination, as these silk gossamers that float through the skies dangling men below. As you watch the busy loft, filled with girls sewing pure white pieces of finest quality silk together at electric sewing machines (some of which drive four needles at a time), you notice how many othergirls and men are scrupulously examing their handiwork. Time after time the threads and stitches are checked. No wonder: a mortal’s life hangs on these stitches, a life hangs on the infinitely fine filament spun by the Japanese silkworm. “A man’s life hangs by a thread.” This is, in some ways, the strangest of all forms which modern warfare has taken. I have seen in the big aviation schools which I have visited the young soldiers bailing out of their aeroplanes. They drop like a plummet a second or two and then suddenly the parachute opens out like a blossom and they descend slowly through the sky, wafted down like an ant swinging to a blown dandelion puff. Where do these parachutes come from; who makes them? Well, here they are being made right before your eyes, by this prosaic and very workmanlike small-town factory which yet, somehow, has about it some of the same element of fantasy and romance that I found in a roaring aeroplane motor factory. The company employs about 300 men and women altogether, at present, working two shifts, and its pay-roll is a very much appreciated addition to the pay-roll of Washington, Indiana, a community of about 10,000. where you can hear a rooster crowing not far from the main street. The average of wages is well above the 35 cents an hour minimum prescribed by law, it is said, and there is a 40-hour week, with time and a half for overtime. A parachute and its harness weigh only 22 pounds. The parachute is made up of 24 “panels" which are shaped something after the fashion of the pieces of cloth between the ribs of an umbrella. Each panel, in turn, is composed of four smaller sections. That makes 96, all told. The big job, accordingly, is cutting out the pieces and sewing them up. When the four little pieces are sewn a machine is used with two needles that leaves a double row of stitching. When the 24 composite panels are stitched a fourneedle machine is used that simultaneously sends four rows whirring diwn the seam. When the big canopy is partly finished the “lines” are inserted from which the jumper hangs: 24 of these come down. They are made of silk, too, and woven after the fashion of a hollow-silk shoe-lace, which they closely resemble except that each one of them is tested at 450 pounds. NO MISTAKES. Every inch of every seam is examined. As we watch, an eagle-eyed young inspector puts her finger on a spot and pins a “repair, tag” to it. We examine the place. It doesn’t look very serious. One of the four parallel lines of sewing has run off the edge. But back it goes. This isn’t a question of a minor mistake. When life hangs on a thread there must be no mistakes. A skip stitch, a broken thread, a broken stitch: these are all matters for rejection. Pure silk is used because of its amazing strength and light- / ness. It is cut on the bias to retard rips. An ordinary rip, anyway, reaches a panel stitching like one we have been watching, and stops. The army now has a two-year silk supply in storage, and if that were used up, says that chemical fibre would do.

Every parachute must be droptested from an aeroplane before the Government accepts it. It is dropped at 100 miles an hour at 500-foot alti-

tude and must open in four seconds. Just to make it harder, the Government requires that the suspension lines be given three complete twists inside the case. Rudolf (Hess), the dummy, who weighs between 150 and 175 pounds, is used foi’ these tests. Incidentally, this has given rise to another local industry. One man has turned his pasture into a flying field and drops the parachutes from his aeroplane for the Government tester. The little pilot parachute which pops out first looks like a child's toy and has a spring in it, and facilitates the quick opening of the big canopy that follows. PROBLEM OF GRASSHOPPERS. It was not long before it was noticed that the Indiana grasshoppers would provide no small problem for the United States Flying Service. There is a theory that the brown-looking liquid that a grasshopper ejects from its mouth is partly digested food. Whatever it is, it is bad for parachutes. But if this brown stain is cleaned off the parachute promptty, it' does not weaken the material. This is one of the big cares of the manufacturing company. Along with this goes the testing of every other piece of goods, whether cotton duck webbing for parachute case or rubber rip cord housing, which looks like the hose of a bicycle pump, or the metal, knuckles of the harness. You come away feeling that so far as it is possible to make them, these gossamers of safety, these ladders from the sky, are true and strong. The army is just as confident that the mechanism for packing and releasing them is fool-proof. Meanwhile, some 200 young women of Washington, Indiana, sew and shear for Uncle Sam, and illustrate again how strange and diverse are the manifestations of the defence effort.