Hosiery Camboxes for Textile Machinery

A cambox is the housing that carries a knitting machine's cams in their working positions over the cylinder — the complete cam assembly for a feed, fitted and timed as one unit. On hosiery and sock machines, where small-diameter cylinders knit heels, toes and patterned legs through complex needle selection, camboxes are intricate: stitch cams, transfer and clearing cams, and selection components packed into a small space and timed to fractions. Cambox manufacture and reconditioning is a recognised speciality within knitting machine parts.

Inside a Hosiery Cambox

The cambox presents the cam tracks to the needle butts in sequence — clearing, stitch drawing, tuck and miss positions — and on hosiery machines it works with the patterning and heel-and-toe mechanisms that distinguish sock knitting from plain fabric knitting. Because the box is removed and refitted as an assembly during machine work, its mounting accuracy and internal timing are as important as the condition of each cam inside it. Inchlines of Leicester, listed below, is a specialist in hosiery machine camboxes, cams, feeders, yarn carriers and accessories, within its wider circular knitting parts practice.

Cambox Service and the Parts Around It

Camboxes are serviced as units: stripped, tracks inspected for stepping and wear, worn cams replaced in matched relation to their neighbours, and the box re-timed on the machine. Its working neighbours wear with it — feeders and their feed wheels (Inchlines' Self Grip Wheel is extensively used on large diameter fabric machines) and yarn carriers, which the same firm refurbishes with a special ceramic coating that has proved successful in giving carriers a longer life on machines knitting abrasive yarns. For hosiery mills, a specialist who can take the cambox as a whole — rather than selling loose cams alone — is the practical sourcing route, and that is the service pattern this category exists to record.

Companies Supplying Hosiery Camboxes