A downy future through knopping

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 20

A downy future through knopping

By

MAVIS AIREY

Depression is the mother of some unusual inventions. Down behind the silos on a Kirwee farm, the Frizzells’ old pighouse echoes no longer to the grunts of animals but the clunks and grinds of a machine that would make Heath Robinson proud. In at one end goes wool waste ... out at the other come some highly desirable knops. Knops? Those flecks that give a Berber carpet its distinctive pile. When the Berbers made them, according to Alastair Frizzell, whose brainchild the machine is, the flecks came naturally, the result of poorquality fibres in the wool dying out a different colour. In New Zealand, the carpet wool is of too even quality for the flecks to occur naturally; they have to be added. Hence the knops. The best ones are felted. For years they had to be imported, at considerable expense. One local factory had a knopping machine, but it produced only unfelted knops, which give the carpet a streaky, rather than a knobbly effect. Alastair Frizzell came upon it by chance, when he was looking for a machine that could remove the coarse “guard hairs” from his cashmere fleeces and so improve their market value. The technique is a standard process overseas, but the companies are understandably secretive and Frizzell knew he would have to develop his own methods.

He went to a Christchurch carpet mill to see if they had any surplus machinery suitable for modification and, to his surprise, was offered several, including the knopping machine. Although the guard hair remo-

ver is still at the experimental stage, the Frizzells’ market research showed there was a surprisingly high demand for knops. Together with two friends, Judith and Jeffrey Pascoe, who share their interest in cashmere goat down, he and his wife, Elizabeth, formed the Canterbury Fibre Company last year. The project won a Canterbury Enterprise Scheme award, which included business management training as well as a grant for research and development. Frizzell has successfully modified the machine to produce either dry or felted knops, and can vary the density of the product by varying the proportions of card waste from carpet making and crossbred wool. The finer the wool, the denser the knop. In eight hours, the machine can produce about half a tonne of knops; 100 tonnes a year would be its maximum capacity, Frizzell estimates. Selling for half the price of imported knops, they find a ready market. The export potential looks good, too. Once knop production is established, Frizzell will start work on building a bigger and better dehairing machine. The prototype is already removing 95 per cent of the guard hairs from the cashmere fleeces, sufficient for home spinners. Frizzell, who is president of the Cashmere Producers Association, believes the potential in this area is promising too. Finest quality cashmere sells for more than $l5O a kilogram in its raw state. This year, New Zealand’s , exports of goat down, both

cashmere and cashgora, will be worth about $lO million, he says. The Mohair/Cashmere Warehouse, which is responsible for marketing New Zealand’s goat fibre, estimates that, by 1995, exports will be worth $65 million. Given that the world’s biggest cashmere producer,. China, appears to be trying to process more of its own static production, and given the political turmoil in the next largest producers, Iran and Afghanistan, Frizzell thinks Western processors will be putting a premium on cashmere from Australia and New Zealand. Reliable classing, reliable quality, marketing and delivery, plus a relatively stable economy should make New Zealand’s products very attractive, he says. That, combined with research showing the beneficial effects of running goats with sheep — they improve the pasture quality — could account for the very confident gleam in Alastair Frizzell’s eye.