Design, development and evaluation of Tubular blazer: A sustainable gum production hand tool

The demand for natural gums is increasing due to their applications in food, pharmaceutical and other industries. However, the traditional extraction method used to tap the gum causes severe injury to the trees, and ultimately population of these trees and gum production from trees is decreasing day by day. To overcome this problem, a tubular blazer was designed, developed and tested at ICAR-National Institute of Secondary Agriculture, Ranchi. The overall dimension of developed tool i.e., length, width and height were 235 mm × 130 mm × 25 mm, respectively, weighing 0.77 kg. The tool can be used for different gum producing tree such as Buchanania lanzan, Moringa olifera lam, Butea monosperma, Tarminalia bellirica and Sterculia uren. The testing result of the study showed that the developed tool was simple to operate and safe for making blaze in trees for gum production. The tubular blazer was found suitable for chironji gum (Buchanania lanzan) tapping producing about 661.4 g and 249.4 g of the gum with and without application of gum inducer, respectively. Use of developed tubular blazer saves approximately 95% of time as well as cost for blaze making compared to manual drilling method. Further, the developed tool was found to be less injurious to trees in terms of volume of bark removal in making blaze for gum production.