How is cotton, which comes as short strands of fibre from the plant, made into a continuous thread?
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I work carding machines so I’m kinda excited to answer even tho I don’t understand the process completely yet.
Basically each individual fibre gets mechanically separated and roughly oriented in the same sense. After that, different machines simply twist together, pull and mix those rough threads.
The fibre goes through between 6-8 machines, depending on what we are doing (whether it’s coton, lycra, poly, kevlar, etc).
My boss told me every machines stretches the fibre about 6x it’s original lenght. Meaning the loose thread coming out of the first machine (which has about an inch diameter and is extremely fragile) gains 6 times it’s lenght at every step. I work the first two processes and the difference in strength and diameter between the first and second machine is already way noticable.
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