Forklift trucks unload cotton bales from trucks into the warehouse. The cotton bales are then transferred to the blow room on the 1st floor by forklift trucks.
In the blow room the bales are opened, and fed into each blending feeder where compressed wads are loosened. The cotton then passes through a series of beaters and cleaners that allow tramp metal, dirt and other foreign material to be removed, and break up the bundles of cotton fibers into smaller but fluffier tufts.
The fiber is then chute-fed through metal ducts to the carding machines.
To prepare the fibers for the subsequent processes, carding machines separate and lay fibers parallel to each other.
During the carding process, two surfaces of wire or metallic card cloth, moving in the same direction but at different speeds on the card machine, comb the fibers into a fine web of generally parallel fibers. The delicate, wide web is then drawn through a tapered cylindrical device called a “trumpet”, which condenses the web into a soft, fleecy, rope-like strand of material known as “sliver”. The sliver is coiled into roving cans for further use at the drawing frames.
The purpose of “drawing” is to further straighten the fibers, reduce the size of the sliver, and accomplish some degree of blending and additional paralleling of fibers.
Usually six or more strands of card sliver are fed into the drawing frame and passed through many sets of rolls. Each pair of rolls rotates successively faster than the preceding pair and draws the sliver out further. Untwisted sliver is coiled in roving cans. This drawing process may be repeated by feeding the cans of sliver from one drawing frame into another.
The sliver from the drawing frames enters directly into open-end spinning machine or ring-type spinning frame. Spinning consists of three basic operations in which machines with rapidly revolving parts reduce the diameter of the sliver to its ultimate fineness by drafting, inserting more twist into it and winding the finished yarn onto bobbins. At this point the yarn may be prepared for weaving.