Mr. Bolette, who has made a name for himself in connection with strap
dividers, has experimented in another direction on the carding engine,
and as his ideas contain some points of novelty we herewith give the
necessary illustrations, so that our readers can judge for themselves as
to the merit of these inventions.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
Fig. 1 represents the feeding arrangement. Here the wool is delivered by
the feed rollers, A A, in the usual manner. The longer fibers are then
taken off by a comb, B, and brought forward to the stripper, E, which
transfers them to the roller, H, and thence to the cylinder. The shorter
fibers which are not seized by the comb fall down, but as they drop
they meet a blast of air created by a fan, which throws the lighter and
cleaner parts in a kind of spray upon the roller, L, whence they pass on
to the cylinder, while the dirt and other heavier parts fall downwards
into a box, and are by this means kept off the cylinder. It is evident
that in this arrangement it is not intended to keep the long and the
short fibers separate, but to utilize them all in the formation of
the yarn. The arrangement shown in Fig. 2 refers to the delivery end.
Instead of the sliver being wound upon the roller in the usual way, it
runs upon a sheet of linen, P¹, as in the case of carding for felt, with
a to-and-fro motion in the direction of the axis of the rollers. In this
way one or more layers of the fleece can be placed on the sheet, which
in that case passes backwards and forwards from roller S to R, and _vice
versa_. It is, in fact, the bat arrangement used for felt, only with
this difference, that the bat is at once rolled up instead of going
through the bat frame. In the manufacture of felt it is of course of
importance to have many very thin layers of fleece superposed over
each other in order to equalize it, and if the same is applied to the
manufacture of cloth it will no doubt give satisfactory results, but may
be rather costly.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
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