'Jumbo Cakes' (Large Cheeses of Spun Yarn)

This procedure is labour intensive as the individual cakes are manually 'doffed' (removed from machine), loaded on to buggies, transported to the next processing stage, loaded on to a creel and the machine strung up for subsequent processing.

Obviously the manufacture of larger cakes will substantially reduce the labour costs, and within certain limits the labour required is almost inversely proportional to the cake weight. There are, of course, practical limits to the size of cakes which can be manually handled. The ideal was to integrate the two processes and completely eliminate this labour cost, but this approach required new and expensive equipment, capable of 'spinning' yarn at very high speeds. It also suffered from a lack of flexibility for systems where a common spun feedstock was supplied to a number of secondary processes.

Fibremakers developed a technology for making the best of both worlds for some nylon processes. The spinning wind up was modified to allow the production of very large cakes, about ten times the size of conventional cakes (e.g. 50 kg instead of 5 kg). This change required the introduction of pneumatic handling equipment at spinning, because the cakes were too large for safe manual handling. To avoid the double handling associated with the conventional creeling of cakes for secondary processing, the transport buggies were re-designed to act as mobile sectional creels.

By this innovation, Fibremakers were able to eliminate most of the labour costs associated with cake handling, without losing the flexibility of operation required for many processes.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering