Wool carding

Cotton Manufacturing Processes

	Bale Breaker				Blowing Room
	Willowing
	Breaker Scutcher		Batting
	Finishing Scutcher		Lapping
	Carding				Carding Room
	Sliver Lap
	Combing
	Drawing
	Slubbing
	Intermediate
	Roving		Fine Roving
	Mule Spinning	-	Ring Spinning		Spinning
			Reeling		Doubling
	Winding		Bundling		Bleaching
	Weaving shed				Winding
	Beaming				Cabling
	Warping				Gassing
	Sizing/Slashing/Dressing				Spooling
	Weaving
	Cloth		Yarn (Cheese)- - Bundle		Sewing Thread

Carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibers between differentially moving surfaces covered with card clothing. It breaks up locks and unorganised clumps of fibre and then aligns the individual fibers to be parallel with each other. In preparing wool fibre for spinning, carding is the step that comes after teasing.

The word is derived from the Latin carduus meaning thistle or teasel, as dried vegetable teasels were first used to comb the raw wool.

These ordered fibres can then be passed on to other processes that are specific to the desired end use of the fibre: Cotton, batting, felt, woollen or worsted yarn, etc. Carding can also be used to create blends of different fibres or different colours. When blending, the carding process combines the different fibres into a homogeneous mix. Commercial cards also have rollers and systems designed to remove some vegetable matter contaminants from the wool.

Common to all carders is card clothing. Card clothing is made from a sturdy flexible backing in which closely spaced wire pins are embedded. The shape, length, diameter, and spacing of these wire pins are dictated by the card designer and the particular requirements of the application where the card cloth will be used. A later version of the card clothing product developed during the latter half of the 19th century and found only on commercial carding machines, whereby a single piece of serrated wire was wrapped around a roller, became known as metallic card clothing.

Carding machines are known as cards. Fibre may be carded by hand for hand spinning.

Science historian Joseph Needham ascribes the invention of bow-instruments used in textile technology to India. The earliest evidence for using bow-instruments for carding comes from India (2nd century CE). These carding devices, called kaman (bow) and dhunaki, would loosen the texture of the fibre by the means of a vibrating string.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, wool in England was being carded using pairs of hand cards, it was a two-stage process: 'working' with the cards opposed and 'stripping' where they are in parallel.

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Wikipedia