The tools we have

Flax ripple (center), hackles (right side), scutchers (lower left) and scutching boards (upper left);

A typical portuguese water operated flax break in the Falx Museum in Marrancos;

A small flax strick that I hackled with my new old hackle;

Gathering good tools for next saturday's flax processing workshop was not easy.
I wanted to find good ripples and hackles, that had been used in real flax work, not because I'm nostalgic about other times, but because you can't easily find new ones for sale and making them with the same quality would be expensive, because of the specific metal work necessary.
I am not al all nostalgic about the "old times" when I look at these tools, because I know there's nothing romantic about scutching kilos and kilos of flax by hand, maybe except for someone that only knows the work involved in turning flax to linen from pretty black and white pictures and etnographic documents. But, at this precise moment, they're the only way we're going to get the job done and the only way to pick up where we left small scale manufacturing in favor of the large industry.

From this set of tools and a few others that aren't in the photo, part were borrowed from Mr.Abílio who has a large enough collection of flax tools to have set up his own flax museum in Marrancos, others from Fernando Rei and I managed to acquire a copy of each to add to my personal collection and actually put them to use.

For the Serralves farm to be completely self-sufficient in flax to linen production, the only thing missing is the flax break, that is used to brake the bark of the dried flax plant and release the fiber that is in the interior. In Portugal, the typical breaks are small mills motioned by water (second photo).
Every time I look at this machine I think it should already have evolved to something more practical and agile. But right after, I remember that in order to break correctly our portuguese variety of flax (Galego), which is very short and delicate, this machine is so well designed that it works perfectly, breaking it well enough, but not so much that it damages the fiber inside.
Redesigning it is not that easy, but it needs to be done just the same.