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steelyards; you look and see that your beams are even, and, when you have done that, here is a spring-balance attached. And, by the way, we have thought it worth while to patent it. [Laughter.] You don't use any thing that is not patented; you won't even copy it. Now, then, you can just look on that index, and see the tension of those bands. Now, it has been found, on careful examination, and sworn to by two persons, that a frame of ordinary spindles in one of the best mills in New England had bands upon it that were pulling all the way from one to sixteen pounds. What do you think of a difference of sixteen hundred per cent? We have found, within a few weeks, Sawyer spindles banded with twelve pounds side-pull to a spindle. Now, to have an average, we had an engineer go and test a frame with the old form of Rabbeth spindle. The frame was taken just as it had been running, and it was running first rate, apparently. That frame was tested, and the pull of the bands averaged only two and a half pounds. Now, is that too much or too little? That is the question. If it is enough, you don't want five pounds, nor six, nor eight. If that is enough, you don't want any more. He tested that frame, and the result of it was he had sixty-five hundred turns of the spindle (I think one hundred and forty-two spindles, or upwards) to the horsepower, somewhere in that neighborhood. He went to another mill, within a fortnight after that, where he tested the bands, and found the average on a Rabbeth spindle 4.80 pounds, I think it was. Now, I don't believe that is what you want. I don't believe you know where you are. I have said for years, that, where you have twenty thousand spindles, you could afford to pay a man five dollars a day, if he would only regulate your bands. You would save power enough in a steam-mill to pay for it, to say nothing about wear and tear. The loss is perfectly enormous by the amount of power that is wasted, and the amount of wear and tear. And in addition to that is the great amount of banding wasted, where you have eight, ten, fifteen, or sixteen-pounds of side-pull, where you need but three. went to one mill, where some of the spindles had been run twenty-two years, and you would not have known but that they were new, as far as wear was concerned. We did not find any band pulling over three pounds. The mill is making as much yarn, and as good, as any mill, and the manufacturer is getting his yarn, number twenty-nine and a half, spooled at less than

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one-third of a cent a pound. If that amount of pull will produce such a result, you may be sure that that is the limit of what you want. We have found the average somewhere from three to five pounds.

Now, on this same line we have gone a step further. Seeing this thing, my son conceived the idea that, taking this plan, you can just as well tie on the bands, and know just how tight you are going to tie them. We have made an instrument, and tested it, and are satisfied that by putting that on, which is an easy thing to do, it is not going to hinder much of any. You can just draw these whorls up until the edges come even, and have the amount fixed at three pounds, or two and a half, or whereever you find it is necessary, and have all your bands tight, and pressing alike.

I have heard people say they could tell when their yarn was strong enough, without breaking it; they could tell by feeling of it; and a few years ago most of our best mills did not know the strength of their yarn. They might as well say that they could tell how many cords of wood they had, without measuring it. I tell you, gentlemen, that, with such an easy and cheap way as you have of measuring the pull of your bands, you cannot afford to waste the power, and suffer all the evil consequences that are coming from it, by having them all the way from one or two up to ten, twelve, fifteen, or sixteen pounds.

At this point, the hour for recess having arrived, Mr. Draper suspended his remarks, and a recess was taken until two o'clock.

AFTERNOON SESSION.

The convention re-assembled soon after two o'clock, VicePresident Cumnock in the chair.

Mr. DRAPER. If there are any gentlemen here who are interested in seeing a new plan for putting on bands of the same tension, I should be very happy to show it to them. It is a simple thing, and I do not think you would want to be without it. The idea of it is, here is an implement to slip right on to three spindles, we will say, right above the whorls. There is a whorl that comes to the middle spindle that we want to tie the band to, a false whorl, that can go up, we will say, a quarter of an inch beyond the centre of the spindle, if you please, so that it will not bear against it. Then there is a chance to regulate the tension of this with a spring, so that,

when you tie it up
until the edge of this false whorl comes even
with the other, you have got what the tension would be on the
other whorl. Then you slip it right off from this whorl on to the
other. I do not think it would cost any more to put the bands
on to a mill in that way, than it does to put them on in the or-
dinary method; and, after you had got them on, they would be
worth a great many times more. Mr. Weeks, of the Lancaster
mills, has just informed me that he took one of these imple-
ments for the purpose of ascertaining the tension of bands
home with him. He has Sawyer's spindles throughout, in two
different mills; there are some twenty thousand of them, more
or less. In one of his rooms, I understood him to say (if I am
not right, he will correct me) he found no band of over two
and a half pounds tension, and he found some bands with half
a pound tension. He went to the other mill, and he found one
band with as low as a quarter of a pound tension, and others
with five pounds tension, the five pounds tension being invaria-
bly where they had put on new bands. And he further says
that neither the half-pound pull, nor the quarter-pound pull,
made slack yarn. Now, it is not worth while to be so much
afraid of slack yarn, that you waste more power than would
pay for any amount of it.

I do not feel that I ought to take up any more time now. I have only this to say: I think I can indorse what Mr. Woodbury said in regard to the extremes of banding on the same kind of spindles; and I believe the extreme difference of banding will make more difference in your power than there is between any of the different spindles, at the same speed. But do not jump to the conclusion that there is no difference in spindles on that account, because, if an improperly banded Sawyer spindle will run heavily, an improperly banded large spindle will run as much heavier. I said here a good many years ago, when I was first about introducing the Sawyer spindle, that people could afford to pay twenty-five cents apiece for the poorest bobbins to burn, rather than use them. I know I met the objection almost everywhere, that the Sawyer spindle would not bear a poor bobbin; whereas they could use any bobbins for the other spindles, and they would be all right. Now the fact is, that the Sawyer spindle will carry a poor bobbin better than any of them; but you cannot afford to put them on. Suppose we wanted to increase the speed

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of the Sawyer spindle from six thousand to seventy-five hundred as the centrifugal force is as the square of the velocity, while a poor bobbin might run reasonably well at sixtyfive hundred, it would do very much harm on the same spindle at seventy-five hundred. In my experience of forty years, I have never known of any way by which we could determine precisely how tight our bands were. Having discovered this method, and made it known to you, I have no doubt you

will profit by it.

Mr. ATKINSON. I should like to call attention to one other matter in this connection. I told Mr. Draper that we should pass a vote of distrust on all his patents at this meeting, if he did not find some good mechanical method of joining the ends of bands, and asked him if they could not be clamped like the wires of a woman's hoop-skirt, and, if they could be clamped, if he could not devise a method that would clamp them after they had been drawn to a uniform tension. He has here the bands that are clamped like the wires of a hoop-skirt; and we will postpone the vote of censure until the next meeting, in the expectation that he will bring an instrument by which that joining can be made under an absolutely uniform tension, if he has not got it already.

I will state to you, also, that I have seen within a week, and hoped to see here, an endless band without any knot or clamp at all, which the party who has it thinks he can make successfully. I hope he can. He is a man skilful enough to do any thing he undertakes.

A MEMBER. I hope he will tell us how to put it on.
Mr. ATKINSON. That will be part of it.

A MEMBER. And how to tighten it.

Mr. ATKINSON. If the members of this Association are not equal to any problem submitted to them, they are not the men I take them for.

NOTE. Since the meeting our Mr. Woodbury has found a band in use in a woollen factory at Oswego Falls, which is made by S. Rowbottom, Meadow Mill, Glossop, near Manchester, Eng., in which the knot is avoided, and the fastening is compassed by a metal link of one-sixteenth-inch wire. The bands are made of twisted cotton, with a loop at each end; the wire link is inserted in the form of a figure 3, and pinched to the form of a figure 8. Mr. Woodbury was attracted by the great steadiness of the spindles, and was assured by Mr. David Ramsden, the agent, that it was mainly due to the mode of fastening of the bands, and that these bands wear twice or three times as long as those knotted in the usual way. Samples may be seen at our office.

Mr. DRAPER. I only want to say one thing that I omitted, because Mr. Atkinson likes to have people criticise his way somewhat. There is one thing in that problem, the weighting of bands, which is different from what it is in actual use, and that is (I presume it may have occurred to you all), if the band shrinks at all, it must shrink against the full pressure of that weight. Now, then, in the spinning-frame the problem is different. When a band stretches there, it is not so tight. If it stretches in this experiment, it will be the same as if the spindle was moved away from the cylinder, just as much as the weight is moved away. There is that difference in this

matter.

One thing occurs to me that I think is exceedingly important in connection with this question about starting up. There are people here who know that the coefficient of friction with. continuous lubrication is very different from what it is with intermittent lubrication. Now, you start an upright bearing such as we have in ordinary spindles, and all the horizontal bearings, hundreds of bearings in a spinning-frame, that had stood from Saturday night until Monday morning (and perhaps they let them run longer Saturdays, without oiling, than they do any other day), and you find on top of the whorls the oil that should be in the bolsters; and, that having all run out, the frame starts without the proper lubrication, and especially without any proper distribution of it. That is one of the great elements of this starting up hard, as well as the question of warmth.

Mr. WOODBURY. I would remind the gentleman, who raised the question of the difference of condition between the bands I described and those in use in practice, of the fact that I had the lightest weight for the band to pull up that I could use. A quarter-pound weight was just light enough to pull the band up, and to start, so that I should have, as I believe I mentioned, the friction of motion and not the friction of repose. I repeated the test quite a number of times a day, so that the bands should be perfectly free to contract; and when they did contract they were not obliged to lift weights, because I lifted them from time to time, perhaps twice an hour. As I was at work in the room there, I had an opportunity to do so.

Mr. ATKINSON. Of course the difference in condition is admitted as inevitable. We only approach as near as we can, by

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