Design and testing of a Semi Automatic Rubber Tree Tapping machine

Rubber tree tapping is considered to be a skill oriented job and the availability of such labors are getting worse day by day. This is considered to be the one of the reason which affected the natural rubber productivity from Indian plantations. Even though cheap unskilled labors are available, they cannot be used for tapping by using the traditional V groove knife or Jabong knife. So this paper discusses about a low semi automatic rubber tree tapping machine (SART) which can be used by an unskilled labor to perform tapping on the rubber tree by preserving the tree health. The proposed machine is fabricated and tested on the tree. Also a comparative study is made on the effort required to operate the machine with the traditional tapping knives used for the purpose.