Yarn Carriers for Textile Machinery

A yarn carrier is the part that presents yarn to the needles at each feed of a knitting machine — guiding the end from the feeder into exactly the position where the needle hooks are passing, at the angle the machine maker intended. It is a small, precisely shaped part working in the busiest area of the machine, and yarn slides across its guide surfaces continuously, so carrier wear quietly becomes fabric faults: missed ends, trapped yarn, uneven feeding and holes. Carriers are therefore precision spares, and — unusually among knitting parts — they can often be refurbished instead of replaced.

Carriers, Feed Wheels and Abrasive Yarns

Carrier guide surfaces suffer most from abrasive yarns — spun yarns with hard fibres, textured and technical yarns — which polish, then groove, the contact points until the yarn no longer tracks truly into the needles. Inchlines Ltd, the Leicester-based textile engineers listed below, has introduced a refurbishing service for yarn carriers in which the carriers receive a special ceramic coating. Ceramic coated carriers are becoming a more urgent requirement for circular fabric machines which need to knit particularly abrasive yarns, and the ceramic coating has proved successful in giving carriers a longer life. The same company reports continuing success with its Self Grip Wheel, a feed wheel extensively used on large-diameter fabric machines.

Inchlines designs and manufactures a range of other parts and accessories for circular knitting machines, and is a specialist in hosiery machine camboxes, cams, feeders, yarn carriers and accessories.

Replace or Refurbish?

A carrier that is bent, cracked or worn beyond its profile is replaced; a carrier whose shape is sound but whose yarn surfaces are grooved is a refurbishing candidate — stripped, re-coated with the special ceramic coating and returned with a harder, longer-wearing yarn surface than the original steel. Mills running abrasive yarns build the coating into their routine, sending carriers in sets per machine so feeding stays matched across feeds. Ordering either way runs by machine make, model, diameter, gauge and feed position: carriers are handed and positioned parts, and a carrier made for one feed arrangement will not sit correctly in another. Keeping one refurbished spare set per machine type turns a carrier stop into a change-over, not a wait. Carrier condition is easiest to judge from the fabric and the yarn together: a carrier beginning to groove shows first as a faint fuzzing or hairiness on the yarn leaving it, then as occasional trapped ends at that one feed while other feeds run clean. Checking carriers during needle changes and cleaning rounds — running a fingertip over the yarn contact surfaces to feel for the first roughness — catches that stage cheaply, while the carrier is still a refurbishing candidate rather than a cause of faulty fabric already delivered. Removed carriers are worth keeping tagged with the machine and feed they came from, because that history tells the refurbisher where the wear fell and tells the mill whether one position is eating carriers faster than the rest.

Companies Supplying Yarn Carriers