Disposable tea bags, how do you wrap the tea leaves with filter paper?
Before I tried to make milk tea at home, I bought the teabags with crushed tea leaves in the picture below. Not to mention the cost-effectiveness, I also save myself from filtering the tea. What's happier is that I can wash one less filter.
🤔 The design of this filter paper bag, taking into account the hygiene problem, is basically determined to be the tea packaged by the machine. So how is the tea packaged obediently? Immediately entered the "Interesting Manufacturing" decryption mode...
Half open
Before entering the assembly line, let's take a look: Except for a metal staple to fasten the bag opening and the tea bag hanging line, I turned around and found no seam with filter paper. but! After opening the tea bag from the middle, it turned out that it was folded in half, and the hot press seam of the filter paper was hidden. The design is very clever!
Filter paper bag tea
The tea bags are wrapped by a layer of filter paper into long strips as shown in the picture above and then cut out, so the filter paper that is fed into the packaging machine at the beginning is also like the one in the picture below. After loading piles of broken tea leaves at the orange arrow, the filter paper is gradually wrapped: the cross section looks from a flat —— type, to an unclosed △ type, and then to a flat □ type.
Let's look at a lens looking up from the bottom up, and we can see that the broken tea leaves are separated in piles, instead of being covered with a whole strip of filter paper.
Cut into packages
After the broken tea leaves are wrapped by the filter paper, the hot press on the left side of the picture below will continue to heat and press the continuous seams, and the broken tea leaves will be completely wrapped with the filter paper; afterwards, they will reach the middle cutting point. When the scissors go down, what comes out is the prototype of the small independent tea bag on the right side~ Then press and fold it on the right side, and the tea bag seems to sit up in a dying dream...
Press out the tea bag
Let's watch the decomposition steps in slow motion, and there are two piles of broken tea leaves in a small tea bag. After being sent to the center of the big turntable, as shown in the picture below, when pressed in the middle, a W shape appears at the bottom of the tea bag, and the mechanical arms on both sides are folded, just like the machine master made an angular tea bag origami. .
Fold the tea bag
The turntable continues to rotate, and then it is time to fold the top of the filter paper bag into a triangle.
Continuing our "origami game", the triangular tea bag has to be folded inward.
Order on the line
After this, you need to use small staples, not only to seal the tea bag tightly, but also to fix the hanging thread, which can kill two birds with one stone~
Since it is a continuous thread hanging, to make an independent small tea bag, there is also a single operation to cut one side of the thread hanging.
Turntable panorama
An independent tea bag is so finalized~ Finally, we review this "big turntable", the full flow chart of slow motion.
Simple tea bag
The half-folded tea bag introduced above is considered a high-end product with a neater packaging. In addition, let’s take a look at how to make two simple filter paper tea bags~
With hanging line
This common simple tea bag with a hanging line is a vertical production line like the one shown in the figure below. It is still a single layer of filter paper folded in half to wrap the tea leaves. Only this time, the filter paper with a flat cross section is slowly turned into a V shape, and then the broken tea leaves are filled in the opening of the V, and then packed more tightly, the tea bag becomes a U shape. After that, the hot pressing machine heats the hanging thread into the edge, and finally cuts it horizontally, and a small square tea bag is finished~
No hanging line
What if the hotel prepares tea bags for you without a string? Hey, let’s see how to make a double-layer filter paper: First, on the first layer of filter paper, the machine automatically puts piles of broken tea leaves
。
Then quickly cover with another layer of filter paper.
Finally, the heat press machine first heat-presses and seals tightly, and then cuts it down, which is collected into individual tea bags~
