Worsted Yarn Manufacturing

A fine smooth yarn spun from combed long staple wool. Worsted yarns are more tightly twisted than the bulkier woolen yarns. The soft, heavy yarn is strong and durable and is often used for sweaters. Worsted yarns are also used for fine dress fabrics and suit materials.

Manufacturing Process

Sheep Shearing

Sheep shearing is the process by which the woolen fleece of a sheep is cut off. Cut-off wool is called fleece. It is also called "grease wool" because of all the oil and lanolin in the wool.

Sorting

Sheared wool is sorted according to different colors, quality, texture, type and they are sorted into different grades according to these parameters.

Scouring

Wool taken directly from the sheep is called "raw" or "grease wool". It contains sand, dirt, grease and dried sweat (called suint). The weight of contaminants accounts for about 30 to 70 percent of the fleece's total weight. To remove these contaminants, the wool is scoured in a series of alkaline baths containing water, soap and soda ash or a similar alkali. Rollers in the scouring machines squeeze excess water from the fleece, but fleece is not allowed to dry completely.

Worsted Carding

Carding is the only process that can untangle and individualize the fibers. After scouring and drying, the vegetable matters still remain in the wool. The bulk of these foreign matters are removed in carding. Carding also achieves intimate mixing of wool fibres, which is only possible with individualized fibers.

Preparative Gilling

The preparative gilling is mainly to align the fibers in a parallel direction, further blend the wool through doubling and to add moisture and lubricants. This is done by using a coarser comb. The main objectives of the gilling machine are to further align the fibers in card sliver and to blend the slivers from different cards. A gilling machine is also known as a gill box, or simply a gill.

Worsted Combing

Combing is a critical step in worsted processing. Combing process removes short fibers, neps, and impurities (collectively known as noils), further mixes and aligning fibers and forms a continuous rope-like comb sliver.

Finisher Gilling

Finisher gilling is mainly aimed to remove the mild entanglement introduced to the combed sliver.

Drawing

Drawing is an advanced operation which doubles and redoubles slivers of wool fibers. The process draws, drafts, twists, and winds the stock, making the slivers more compact and thinning them into slobbers. Drawing is done only for worsted process.

Roving

Slivers obtained from draw frame are subjected to roving frame to produce rovings. In this process, slivers are drawn out by roving frame and a slight twist is also inserted to form lengths suitable for spinning. Roving can be efficiently spun into yarn on a spinning frame.

Spinning

Roving is then spun into yarn by giving more twist to yarn.