Cotton Manufacturing

by Christopher Parkinson Brooks

Card Cutting and Repeating.

The method of transferring designs to design paper is described on page 93. After the design has been finished the cards have to be cut. The first set is prepared in a piano card-cutting machine, the place where the hole has to be made being read from the design—thus, if for the first pick the 1, 2, 9, 15, 18, 30, 31, 32, 33 and 40 hooks have to be raised, holes would be made as under, looking at the face of the card or the side which is in contact with the needles—

Numbers indicating holes.	1	9	.	.	33	.	The left-hand side here is the right on the machine.
	2	.	18	.	.	.
	.	.	.	.	.	.
	.	.	.	.	.	.
	.	.	.	30	.	.
	.	15	.	31	.	.
	.	.	.	32	40	.

The piano card-cutting machine is shown at [Fig. 70].

The punches which make the holes in the card are operated by the attendant’s feet actuating a treadle, but the punches are regulated by his finger pressing certain keys and thus causing only those punches to be locked where holes are required. There are only sufficient keys to cut the short row of 8 at one stroke.

FIG. 70.

After one set of cards has been cut from the design, any number of sets can be made from it on a repeating machine. The original set is placed on a jacquard cylinder and actuates the needles in the ordinary manner, excepting that the hooks are pushed on the knives by the blanks in the card. These hooks are attached to punches, and at each stroke of the knives a card is cut, a duplicate of the original one then on the lantern face. The holes are cut by the punches which are not lifted and which are locked by wedges at each stroke. On this machine cards can be repeated at the rate of 40 per minute.