Glossary

The words a spinning floor uses.

Every one of these will come up in a conversation about a mill. None of them are ours.

Sliver: A continuous untwisted rope of fibre, roughly the thickness of a wrist. The form the material takes from carding to the speed frame.
Can: The cylindrical container sliver is coiled into. Hand-pushed between machines. Around fifty million of them are in service worldwide.
Roving: Sliver drafted finer and given a small amount of twist so it survives handling. The last stage before yarn.
Bobbin: The package roving is wound onto at the speed frame, and what hangs in the ring frame creel.
Cop: The small dense yarn package built on a ring frame spindle.
Cone: The large package a cop is rewound into at winding. What the mill actually sells.
Creel: The frame that holds the feed packages above a machine — cans at the draw frame, bobbins at the ring frame.
Doff: To remove full packages from a machine and replace them with empty ones. A doff is both the action and the batch it produces.
Draft: The amount a strand is thinned. A draft of 40 means the material leaves forty times longer and forty times finer than it entered.
Count: How fine the yarn is. In the English system a higher number means finer yarn — 60s is much finer than 10s, and worth considerably more per kilogram.
Hank: A measure of sliver or roving fineness. Getting it wrong at the draw frame produces yarn of the wrong count.
Traveller: The small C-shaped clip that runs around the ring at the ring frame, inserting twist. It can pass tens of thousands of times a minute.
Ends down: Broken ends. The standard measure of ring frame performance, counted per thousand spindle-hours.
Piecing: Rejoining a broken end by hand so the spindle can run again. An operator does this hundreds of times a shift.
Pneumafil: The suction system that catches material from a spinning position after an end breaks. What ends up in it is pure waste.
Lap-up: Fibre wrapping itself around a drafting roller instead of passing through. Stops the position and can damage the cots.
Noil: Short fibre removed by the comber. Necessary for quality, and the main reason a combed route loses far more weight than a carded one.
Clearer cut: The yarn clearer at winding detecting a fault and cutting it out. Each cut costs a splice and a little length.
Hard waste: Twisted yarn waste. Unlike soft waste it cannot be fed back into the line, which is why a defect caught at winding costs so much more than one caught at the card.
Roving stop motion: A device that clamps the roving when an end breaks, so the drafting system stops feeding material into the waste.