3. It must have the proper staple (length).
4. It must be of a certain softness or hardness.
5. It must have the proper felting qualities if the material is to be fulled.
6. It must either scour white, or else have sufficient lustre to take dyes.
Clothing and Combing
As we take up the manufacture of worsted and woolen yarns we shall see how these qualifications play a different part in the two processes. At the outset the only important difference we are concerned with is staple length. Generally speaking, wools under two inches are too short to be combed and are classed as clothing wools. Clothing wools are used for woolens, combing wools for worsteds. This applies only to wools of fine fibre. The mere fact that a wool has long staple length does not make it a combing wool. As a rule, the coarser the wool the longer its staple, and the longest wools are the exceedingly coarse “common” or “braid” wools, which can only be used for carpet manufacture.
Sorting Wool
In grading and sorting, practically the only guide is the fineness of the individual fibre. The other qualifications just enumerated have a very important bearing on what the wool can be used for, but they have very little to do with its classification by grades.
Classifications