sher. ntity. ding small red. m to Tere Amount carded per week for 5 cards, . production of 1 card,. or 14 pounds an hour per card. 4,417 pounds. 63 hours. 883 pounds, "Waste made during same week : "Licker-in waste (see sample 5), 27 pounds. Short fly (underneath fancy roller; see sample 6), back into stock (see sample 7), Strippings (see sample 8), . Total weekly waste made on 5 carding engines, or a little over 1 per cent. in all, or only 1 per cent. deducting long fly. "Before I changed the under licker-in into a fancy roller (which runs alternately higher and lower speed than the cylinder, thus at certain short intervals stripping the cylinder and in turn getting stripped by the cylinder), the carding engines had to be stripped once a day, when I received as much waste daily as I do now by stripping only twice a week. "Sample 9 shows the waste from one of the cards when I applied a kind of a shell or dirt extractor by means of knife-like blades which extend over three of the strippers, thus striking off and collecting in a suitable trough, shell and dirt which hang at the extremity of the cotton fibres. "The card engines are clothed with Walton's card filleting, cylinder and licker-in angular wire, and all other rollers round wire. The fluted rollers I have replaced lately with feed-rollers covered with Calvert's card, and have experienced a notable improvement in carding from it. "Sample 10 is a sliver from the third head drawing-frames which have four rows of rollers and four deliveries to each head, with a coiler and can-motion to each delivery. Draught 1: 6 inches each head and 6 doublings to each delivery. Hank fineness of drawing-frame sliver, .185; same as card sliver. "Our carding could be improved upon, not so much as regards quantity, but quality, if the carding engines had a firmer floor to stand upon, which would admit of closer setting than I am enabled to do. Our scutcher-room is also somewhat deficient: one passage through a one cylinder-opener' and two passages through a single-beater scutcher' is all the clearing the cotton gets before it reaches the carding engines; hence these have to perform some of the scutching, 6 which is seen in the large amount of licker-in waste, and is prejudicial to good carding. "I reached the highest production on our five cards last week, carding over 4,500 pounds during regular working hours, the cards being twice stripped and once ground and reset (occupying about eight hours) during the week. The product was fully as good as when you were here. I spun over 4,200 pounds of (mule) yarn that week, equal to 30 hanks a spindle, warp and filling of No. 214 average. "Yours respectfully, “OTTO J. HINTERMIŞTER.” And I have a statement from across the water. This is a mill filled entirely with machinery similar to General NYE'S. They are spinning No. 54 yarn. This is the statement they give : "The Heppings Vale Cotton Spinning Company.—Carding engine, 150 revolutions of cylinder per minute; 45 inches diameter; doffer, 22 inches; licker-in, 9 inches; 8 rollers, 5 inches; 8 clearers, 3 inches; production, 500 pounds (yarn) per week of 56 hours; number of yarn, 54; production per spindle per 56 hours, 7 ounces. Cost per pound, including every expense, waste, interest, etc., 311⁄2 pence, say 8.039 cents gold, American money. "The mill has divided an average dividend of 20 per cent. for six years." There are a good many points about the English card that I think are not understood. I will mention one or two, which I am glad to see the machinists here are paying attention to. The first important thing in working a large card is to have the cylinder properly balanced. In the ordinary way of balancing a cylinder, it may stand in any position on the friction rolls, but when you begin to revolve it at a rapid speed, the weight which you put in to balance the cylinder may be at the wrong end, although the cylinder may be set at any point when it is not revolving; still, if the weight is put at the wrong end of the cylinder, the tendency is to produce a shaking motion, and the result is you cannot set close, and setting close in carding is the main thing. I dare say many gentlemen here have set cards very close to the gauge, but the moment the card is started you find it is too close; the card cylinder moves a little and DOA T The everything is rubbing, and you have to set it farther off. reason is that the cylinder is out of balance. I saw an instance of it last week, at a mill not very far from here, where the cylinder by some means got broken, and they put a plate on to repair it, and in order to balance this plate they had to put another piece on the other side. The card was being clothed, and I called the attention of the agent to it, and said, "I am almost certain that cylinder is out of balance." He said, "No, we have balanced it." I said, I said, "Will you put it on quick speed for me?" He put it on quick speed for me, and the result proved I was right; the weight was on the wrong end and the motion was shaky. Of course the cylinder may be balanced, but the weight may be misplaced; and if you have one end of the cylinder the heavy side and the opposite end on the other side heavy (to balance the cross-corner), the motion will be unsteady, and you cannot set close, and that is the great point. You want to be able to set to a hair's breadth. Closeness in selling is everything in carding. I find some machinists have begun to balance their cylinders running. The plan adopted is to have a frame with loose pedestals that will slide about a quarter or half an inch, and run the cylinder to begin with at a slow speed. You can balance it as well as you can on antifriction rolls, and then begin and run slowly, and you will find that just as soon as the cylinder begins to revolve the pedestal will work sideways, then move the weight (or a part of it) from one end to the other, and your cylinder will run perfectly steady. That has been the misfortune in making large cards in this country; the cylinders are not balanced, and there are very few small cylinders that are not slightly out of balance, no matter how good the castings or how carefully they may have been balanced in the ordinary way. There is another thing I would mention, and that is the prevailing system in England of covering cylinders with full fillets. Wherever it has been used in this country, so far as I have known, it has been with success. In the first place you get twenty-eight per cent. more wire to work, and in the second place you do away with all those spaces that carry currents of air along, acting like a fan. It cannot blow out at the top, because you cover that over; but there is a great draft sideways that has a tendency to spread the cotton on the cylinder and make all those bad selvages which are seen in every mill. In one case this draft was so strong that it would break the sliver down every few moments, and they had to keep a girl to keep the slivers up. Full fillets will cure that evil; and I am trying some now on your small cards, and feel satisfied, from the experience in England, and also from what little experience I have had here in the mills where I have introduced them, that it will make a great improvement in carding. The CHAIRMAN. I believe there have been several additional experiments in single carding, on the American system, which it might, perhaps, be well worth while to bring in at the present time, in this discussion, if any gentleman is prepared to make any statements on that subject. Mr. SMITH. I see Mr. Pevey here. of the Foss & Pevey card? What has he to say Mr. PEVEY. I did not expect to be called upon to make any remarks before this Association, but with your permission, I will explain the under flat card to the best of my ability. I will say in the outset, that I believe in American machinery. [Mr. P. made a sketch on the blackboard of his card, and explained it briefly.] We claim that we have the right principle in this card; that is, carding down, as compared with the top flat card, which cards up. As compared with the roller cards, I have only to say, that Mr. Salmon, the agent of the Lowell Hosiery, has the large 48-inch roller cards: but a mill is now being organized at Lowell to make print cloths, of which he is expected to be the manager; and he has figured to put in twenty-one of the under flat cards, seven in a section. There is another party in Portsmouth, Mr. Thompson, whom you all know as a very prominent manufacturer, and we have the assurance from him that he will order sixty or We have now over seventy of them. one hundred in use. It is no experiment, gentlemen. We have had this card in operation fully two years at the Merrimack and Massachusetts mills, and we are producing fifty to seventy pounds per 36-inch card. By carding down, we claim that we have gravitation and centrifugal force in our favor. It has been said that we were very favorably situated, and that the cards would not run anywhere else. We exhibited one card at the Centennial, and while there a gentleman from Athens, Ga., came up, and he liked the card so much that he ordered six. Those six cards were sent down South, where it is admitted by all, that the skilled labor is not equal to the skilled labor that we have in the New England mills. We sent word that we would like to know when they got them started. They wrote back that the cards were doing very well, but doing only sixty-five pounds per twelve hours. They incidentally remarked, that if those cards were pushed up to eighty-four pounds, as they expected they would be, from what we had said, they would order another section of cards. They also remarked, that they were running their cylinder one hundred, and their doffer eight. We wrote them back to put the speed of the cylinder up to one hundred and twentyfive, and the doffer twelve or thirteen, and we thought they would card certainly eighty-four pounds; and that with cotton as they have it there,-not being pressed as we have it here, they would be able to reach one hundred pounds per twelve hours. We have not heard from those gentlemen directly as to the result, but they have ordered another section, which is perhaps the best evidence of success. We have two strippers, something of that sort [represented by sketch on the blackboard], that strip the under flats twice to the top flats once. We have Mr. Burke, Mr. Battles, and Mr. Ludlam to vouch for the efficiency of this card. A gentleman was in Lowell on Saturday, who made some figures in reference to what the comparative saving would be in labor. They are about putting up a mill that would require two hundred and fifty-two top flat cards. They were going to use top flat cards; no roller cards there. We showed him our cards, and he became satisfied that one hundred and twenty-six of our cards would do the work of the two hundred and fifty-two top flat cards, and the only additional labor required to run one hundred and twenty-six of our cards more than would be required to run one hundred and twenty-six top flat cards, would be simply one grinder. As he figured it up, there would be a saving of some $2,400 a year in labor alone; and also a saving, as compared with the top flat card, of some 21-horse power. I think his figures were 41-horse power as against 62. |
