Preparation Process
Manual or mechanical preparation steps straighten and clean individual bundles of long flax fibers before they are fed into the hackling machine. Performing strick dressing is essential to remove tangled fibers, weeds, and shives from the flax straw after retting. This operation ensures that the fibers are aligned parallel to each other, which reduces fiber breakage in the subsequent processing stages.
Operational Step
Operational steps involved in this task require skilled workers or automated machines to comb through the flax bundles. During strick dressing, the operator grabs a handful of fibers and runs them through a series of metal combs of varying densities. This action separates the long line fiber from the short tow fiber and lays the groundwork for high-quality yarn spinning.
Material Output
Material outputs of this preparation stage are graded by their cleanliness and fiber alignment. Flax that undergoes proper strick dressing produces a high-yield sliver with minimal wastage on the hackling frame. Spinning mills keep daily logs of the yield percentages from each fiber lot to monitor the efficiency of their raw material preparation.
This documentation helps the mill evaluate the quality of the raw flax supplied by different farms and agricultural cooperatives.
