WOOL WORK PRAISED

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32565, 26 March 1971, Page 16

WOOL WORK PRAISED

Dr G. Laxer, director of product development and technical service for the International Wool Secretariat, who will soon also assume responsibility for the secretariat’s research department, has high praise for some of the research work that has been done at the Wool Re-

search Organisation at Lincoln. Based on what he knew had been going on at Lincoln and which had been confirmed by his visit to staff members, Dr Laxer said last week that he thought that some really first class work had been done there. The secretariat could begin to pick Up the results of work in the carpet field and exploit them on behalf of New Zealand carpet wools.

Dr Laxer referred to work done at Lincoln on stabilising or setting white carpet yams so that when they were tufted they could be piece dyed without significant loss of tuft deflni- , tion. This was something that had been needed very much by the LW.S. to fight New Zetland carpet wools’ Sitties, he said, -because ece dyeing was a technique of colouration that was becoming more and more popular as manu-

facturers did not have to hold stocks of coloured yams. One of the disadvantages of wool as compared with synthetics had been that in tufting the tufts tended to become distorted and felted in piece dyeing, but the setting technique developed by Dr D. A. Ross’s group at Lincoln appeared to have overcome this problem. Dr Ross’s group had also done some excellent work in the carpet grading field, which had been filled with confusion. As a result of that confusion synthetics, on the basis of accelerated wear testing on machines in laboratories, had tended to appear superior to wool. The Lincoln group had, however, found a waythrough this maze and had shown that this was not the case. The LW.S. could exploit this rather excellent piece of work to the advantage of wool in countries where carpet grading machines were used. "I use these cases to show that close collaboration between the LW.S. and the Wool Research Organisation is very important for the New Zealand woolgrower, as the results of a lot of the projects -carried out here must be exploited in the Northern Hemisphere if science and technology in New Zealand is to pay off for the woolgrower,” said Dr Laxer.