Weaving preparation: Warping, sizing, drawing-in and tying

Warp preparation plays a significant role in preparing right quality warp for the modern weaving industry. A number of highly automated shuttleless weaving machines such as airjets, gripper and rapier looms are in use in the industry producing fabrics for a variety of applications ranging from garment manufacturing to technical and metal needs. All these machines demand a very high quality warp to meet the ever growing demands of the weaving industry. Weaving quality spun fabric on a high speed loom, such as an airjet loom, requires yarns that are evenly sized, have even moisture percentage, and even elongation with little fluff or yarn breakage. Against such stringent requirements ITMA 07 witnessed some remarkable improvements in the preparatory machines exhibited by market leaders such as Benninger, Tsudakoma, Karl Mayer and Suzuki. ITMA catalogue listed more than 20 companies in the warping and sizing category. But only about 18 of them displayed their equipment; others just distributing information leaflets. In the warping section, Ben-ninger's new machine Versomat attracted with its new concept of making warp sections as small as 4 mm attracted many visitors. However, there was no big show of direct warpers this time. Most of the exhibits were in the sectional warping machines. It seems the popularity of these machines is soaring high due the diversity in the manufacture of high fashion fabrics compared with the traditional clothing requirements, although direct warpers are popular in the filament weaving sector. Sizing machines on show had all the automatic gadgets and controls, including computer controlled sow boxes, perfect cylinder drying arrangements, temperature control of size clubbed with high speeds of around 600 m/min. Benninger's multifunctional sow box encourages pre-wetting concept to reduce degree of sizing, cutting size costs, reducing hairiness, cutting down thread breaks and thereby increasing efficiency. Highly accurate stretch and tension control systems were common in most of the machines. In a nutshell, the quality of fabrics produced on high speed shuttleless looms mainly depends on the quality of warp produced. Despite the reduction in the number of warping and sizing machines exhibited, the latest versions shown by Benninger, Karl Mayer, Suzuki, Tsudokoma and the high quality automatic and semi-automatic warp tying and drawing-in machines from Stäubli, EL&M, Knotex, Fischer-Poege and Titan set a new trend in the weaving preparatory machines.