A STUDY ON THE DESIGN OF A RICE TRANSPLANTING MACHINE,I

Lin Ti-chuan, Ko Chieh, Chien Yi-fong, Chiou Bo-tan (Nanking Reaserch Institute of Agricultural Mechanization)

In this paper various methods of rice planting are briefly mentioned and the method of transplanting in wet field is considered as the most important for Chinese agriculture. A brief historical review on the research of rice transplanting machine in the world especially in Italy is then given, and the agronomical requirements of the transplanting machine to be developed are stipulated. Various types of seedling feeding, picking, planting methods and drive wheel as well as frame work are compared and tested. The design procedure of a 4-rows buffalo-drawn model comprising comparatively satisfactory basic mechanisms, namely, a slope-bottomed seedling box in intermittent transverse motion serving as feeding mechanism, an 8-armed picker wheel with comb-shaped picker-tip serving as picking and planting mechanism, two blade-wheels with cycloidal blades as drive wheels and a shipshaped body serving as frame etc., is sketched and the field test results of the model are tabulated. As the field tests revealed, the model is workable but missing is up to 33％ seedling damage up to 16 ％, depth of planting is ununiform to a certain degree, and mud piles on the sides of the body. Improvements on various mechanisms and the field test results of a revised 6-rows model are described. Tests showed that missing is cut down to 6—11％ while seedling damage down to 7—9%. At the end of the paper, the authors point out that although the 6-rows model is simpler, more reliable and promising, further research work has to be done for improving the quality of operation of the machine and devising a labor—saving method of preparing and putting the seedlings into the feeding box before the machine can be put into production.