ABSTRACT
Over the number of years, lots of changes have taken place in structuring and redesigning the comber. Even then the basic combing operation such as lap feeding, combing by cylinder or even detachment of combed fleece and joining of the two fringes have remained the same. Thus, the general comber appearance has been more or less unchanged.
However, restructuring and redesigning of parts has enabled the removal of complicated driving mechanisms and has further helped in reducing the number of parts as well as their weight. The maintenance of the comber has been simplified; the oiling and greasing procedures are made easy by using non-oil and sintered bushes, centralized oil pumps and plastic pipe connections leading to various important rotating parts. For greasing, the nipples are provided and with the help of grease guns the operation can be done during working.
Even for the machine operator, the workload has been considerably reduced and his mind is made free due to various electrical stop motions. Thus, his operating efficiency either for the same number of machines or even a little more is improved. The basic aim of reaching these objectives is to enable higher production rates to be reached. The present combing machines are capable of working with very heavy laps (from 20 g/m to 70 g/m and above) at remarkably higher speeds (from 90 nips/min to more than 300 nips/min). The number of heads is increased from six to eight. Some modern machines have double-sided working. A larger diameter coiler has enabled the use of larger cans. All this has helped to increase the production from 30 kg/shift to 60 kg/hr. However, it is equally important to note that on and above these improvements in production rates, the quality of the product – comber sliver – has been significantly improved.
