New Challenge To Wool

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30578, 22 October 1964, Page 1

New Challenge To Wool

A German scientist who came to Christchurch yesterday will try to interest local manufacturers in textile lamination, which he claims has many advantages over pure wool products and is up to 50 per cent cheaper.

The most advantageous application of the foam laminated textiles was in the knitwear field, said the scientist, Dr. G. Hauptmann, of the Farbenfabriken Bayer AG Company, of Leverkusen, Germany. The knitwear products, he said, were made by glueing or using a flame process to join thin sheets of polyurethane foam with jersey fabrics. Dr. Hauptmann said that in addition to price-cutting wool products, foam laminated textiles had much better insulation than a woollen garment of the same thickness. An Auckland firm, he said, had already bought machinery to combine the foam laminated textiles. Dr. Hauptmann declined to name the firm. Dr. Hauptmann, said that his company, as specialists in the development and processing of polyurethane foam, supplied the raw materials to many countries. The plastic type of foam, he said, expanded to roughtly 30 times the size of the raw materials when processed. The foam came in three classes, rigid, semi-rigid and flexible. Of these classes, he said, the flexible was by far the biggest. The uses included upholstery, mattresses, sponges, toys, and many others. Dr. Hauptmann said that in

Christchurch he expected to visit firms interested in his company’s products. Polyurethane foam, he said, today had uses such as shoulder pads for suits, the lining of leather bags and for underblankets. Dr. Hauptmann said that his company was at the stage of combining polyurethane foam sheets with paper to make sound-absorbing wallpapers. While too expensive for lining baby’s nursery so far, it already had a wide use in typists’ offices, workshops and other places normally exposed to loud noise. Dr. Hauptmann will leave Christchurch this evening for Sydney before visiting customers of bis company in Singapore, Manila, Japan, Korea, Saigon, and India.