Of possible interest to those who drool over classic cars...

[Dog Star]

From another "railway" forum, there has been a discussion on the development and use of Rexine cloths. Today that forum included a link to the past... an article about the restoration of a machine which was used in the making of Rexine and is again being used to manufacture cloth for classic cars.

Apologies if the link seems to produce content deficient pages... I can see enough of the web pages to realise that there are photos of the machine as found and content which describes the rescue of the machine and the effort to find out how to use the equipment.

regards, Graham

 

[oldravendale]

That is a great article, Graham, and fantastic work to get the machine working again. Equipment like this is so dependent on the skill of the operator that it's a remarkable success to get it working again and in production too. I know from my own experience with high speed film processing machinery that the operators over many years could anticipate problems just by the noises they heard and even fix them on the run. A broken film in one of those, at 1000ft per min was not dissimilar to a break in a newspaper web and could take hours to sort out. Printers at nearly 2000ft per min were even more spectacular but easier to fix as they were dry.

Perhaps one day someone will want to preserve one of those......

Brian

 

[Dog Star]

Equipment like this is so dependent on the skill of the operator...

I know from my own experience with high speed film processing machinery that the operators over many years could anticipate problems just by the noises they heard and even fix them on the run. A broken film in one of those, at 1000ft per min was not dissimilar to a break in a newspaper web and could take hours to sort out.

I so agree with what you say - in the early 1970s I was working at Kirkland near to Rothley. The job was to introduce computer control of the machines which produced double knit crimplene. Each machine had 4096 needles on a circular bed and 64 thread stations arranged around the bed circumference... so the machine produced a fabric tube of about 4 feet in diameter. Every needle "knitted" as the needle passed a thread station, either on the front of the fabric or on the back of the fabric - those needles which "knitted" on the front of the fabric produced the pattern and that was the cause of our problem.

Setting up the machine to run was a manual task and computer control was not permitted until there were 65 rows of knitted material hanging from the bed. Starting under computer control was pretty good, successful and consistent. Our problems started when the computer was requested to change the pattern.... a pattern had an unique audible signature and the old hands soon got to know what our testing was doing from the sound of the machine. One day the pattern change process went wrong and the machine started to knit all of the stitches on one side only - at which point the fabric would drop off of the bed and fall in a tangled heap on the floor. When this happened an old hand would appear even before the inevitable mess on the floor had settled - "look what you have done" was sufficient telling off.

Given the time taken to re-thread a machine I suspect that the skilled operators were quite glad of the overtime payment.

regards, Graham