CTC roller re-grooving and tea machine repair workshop

This workshop re-cuts the grooves on worn CTC rollers, the toothed steel rollers that crush, tear and curl tea leaf in most tea factories on the North Bengal plains. It also repairs other factory machines, such as dryers and sorting machines.

Siliguri sits where three tea belts meet: the Terai around the city, the Dooars to the east and the Darjeeling hills above. Its tea auction centre, open since 1976, sells mostly CTC tea. NABARD's 2023-24 credit plan counts 24,783.56 hectares under tea in the district, 17,542 of them in the hills and the rest in the Terai plains, which mostly make CTC tea. Bought-leaf factories, which process leaf from the many small growers around Siliguri, run CTC rollers too. Blunt rollers make poor tea, so factories want quick, accurate re-cutting close by.

You need a roller grooving machine, a lathe, grinders, a chain hoist and at least one fitter who knows tea machinery. Winter, when plucking stops, is the rush season for overhauls. The hard part is trust: some large gardens cut their own rollers, and factory managers stick with the workshops they know, so one bad job can lose a customer for years.

Visit factory managers and engineers in person, offer a trial job, and promise pickup and return within a fixed number of days.