Wood chips are often used in products such as potpourri for mass and to carry color and aroma or perfume. Currently no product simulated leaves, botanical forms, or other designed symbols. Wood chips for artificial potpourri are typically manufactured by a drill press process. According to the drill press process, a relatively thin piece of wood, usually a plank a few inches thick, is manually positioned on a drill press beneath the drill bit, and the bit is manually lowered with a lever arm into the wood to drill a hole and thus produce wood shavings. After the hole is drilled, the lever arm is raised to raise the drill bit, the wood is manually repositioned in the drill press apparatus, and the bit is lowered again to drill another hole. This manual-labor intensive process is repeated until the piece of wood is substantially exhausted. The holes are drilled close together as an attempt to minimize waste, but even so, a substantial portion of the plank cannot be used and becomes scrap waste. The exhausted piece of wood is replaced with a fresh piece of wood and the process is repeated.
This drill press process produces wood shavings having plainly circular edges. Thus, the process is limited in its ability to repeatably produce wood shavings having a decorative or unusual cross section. The wood shavings vary significantly in size. A substantial quantity of the shavings produced are too small to be used in products such as potpourri. Consequently, the shavings are manually sifted to separate useable material (wood chips) from unusable scrap material.
After sifting, the shavings are colored as desired, for example, by immersing them in a heated dye bath. This process typically yields shavings or chips having a single uniform color. The dyed chips are rinsed with hot water to assure color fastness and are placed on drying trays. The chips may be air dried, but are usually dried in heaters to speed up the drying step. After drying, the chips are bagged for shipment.
Thus, the drill-press process is labor intensive and time consuming, since the drill bit must be repeatably lowered and raised and because the wood must be repeatedly repositioned. The process also produces scrap material which must be manually separated from the useable wood chips by sifting. The process is very limited in its ability to repeatably produce wood chips having a desired cross section and multiple colors to simulate tree leaves and other botanical matter or designed symbols. The limitations on cross section and color especially limits the ability of the process to produce wood chips that realistically simulate various types of botanical matter or other symbols.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,358,738 issued to Craig S. Sawka on Oct. 25, 1994, discloses a method for painting wood chips. The method includes an auger type screw which transports the wood chips from a hopper to a collection bag. As the chips are transported, they are simultaneously sprayed with paint.
Thus, there has been a long felt need for an efficient process for repeatably producing wood chips with a variety of cross sections, including those cross sections that resemble leaves and other botanical matter. And further, there has been a need for a process that produces wood chips that have single or multiple colors, shading., and hues The wood chips can be used in potpourri, for example, and they can be made to simulate botanical matter or a variety of other visually interesting objects.