WOOL “TOPS”

Southland Times, Issue 23167, 7 April 1937, Page 13

WOOL “TOPS”

COMBING AND CLOTHING Some men have only a hazy idea of what is meant by the term “tops,” which they often see in print. It is best to start at the time wool is classed in the shed. The fleeces are put into the classes known as combing and clothing. The former is the longer wool that is suitable for putting through the combing machine. The wool is first of all put through the scour and thoroughly cleaned, after which it is put into the combing machine. This is a most intricate piece of machinery with many very fine teeth which pass through the wool, and take out all the foreign matter and cross fibres. The stuff that is combed out is called noils. The rest of the wool is then brought out in a long ribbon, known as tops, which undergoes a number of processes of spinning until it is brought down to a thread, the size of the thread depending on the fineness of the wool.

Wool, when it is made into tops, is known by the terms 60’s, 64’s, 70’s, 74’s, 80’s, and in a few cases over that. The average run of Merino wool would come into 60’s count, and go on up the other counts, until a very fine wool would be known as 80’s. These counts mean that a wool known as 80’s and which, as before stated, would be very fine, would spin into 80 hanks each, consisting of 560 yards. That means that lib of this count would spin into 44,800 yards, that is 80 times 560 yards. A pound of these tops would give a thread of over 25 miles.

Crossbred . wools being so much stronger in the fibre than Merino, cannot be expected to give anything like the same thread as a Merino wool. Their counts start for the coarsest of Lincoln wool at about 32’s, ordinary Lincoln’s 30’s, Leicesters 40’s. Therefore, a Leicester wool would give a thread of nearly 13 miles.