Carding and condensing

A carding engine, 1898. A rope of scribbled wool is being delivered by the scotch feed.

After being roughly carded on the scribbler, the wool was fed directly into the fine carding engine known simply as the carder. This machine was very similar to the scribbler, but the wire teeth were finer. The wool benefited from being worked a second time as more knots and tangles were removed. The resulting fine web of wool was stripped from the carder and passed straight into the condenser.

The condenser had a roller known as a 'ring doffer', which was ringed round with bands of wire teeth with gaps between each band. This condensed the carded wool into narrow strips which were then rubbed between leather belts to form loose ropes of wool known as 'slivers'. These were wound onto long wooden bobbins and sent off to the spinning department.

It was partly because of the use of un-scoured wool that Early's continued to use a double-doffer condensing machine as this coped better with dirty wool.

Clare Sumner