Our Wool Manufacturing Process
Organic wool mattress manufacturing follows strict quality standards, assuring all cotton and wool materials used in our products are pure and chemical free. Surround Ewe™ has a patented wool mattress making process to assure you of the highest quality materials for the highest quality mattress, comforter, pillows and more.
Emery Benson is here at the Wool Bed Company™ to demonstrate how an organic wool mattress is made. Our goal today is to card out the raw wool in a wool carding machine and make a finished product which will be a comforter, mattress pad, pillows, or whatever product the owner would like to make out of it.
What we need to do is start with the raw wool and get out the chaff that the sheep gathered; the murdochs; and also to straighten the fiber, get it out of these clumps, and make it into one parallel product so the operators can work with it.
By starting this machine, we need to fill the hopper, that will in turn take the wool up over the spike apron and turn its way out the folds so we have to add a certain amount of wool to this machine and start to straighten out the locks of wool.
When it comes up and over the spike apron it fills up the way pan, the way pan drops it onto the feed apron, from there it goes continually into the breast, which starts to open up the locks of wool. This is very hard wire and it's very strong so it hits the burrs and the chaff and opens it up and starts to straighten.
Once we go from the breast we go to the main cylinder of the machine. It's a lot finer wire, a more flexible material called Philip wire. It moves as it's going around so when the fiber hits it, it starts to knock off more dirt. Parallel to the fibers it continues to go from one roller to the next roller until it goes all the way around the main cylinder and goes out the front end.
Once the fiber has come through the last part of the wool workers and strippers, it comes to the finisher doffer, which then comes under the comb and onto the finished roller. As its wound there, it's cut off the wade. Then you take it up to the manufacturer where they'll sew it into the finished product.
The wool carding machine's purpose is to straighten the fiber. It's just like combing your hair after the shower, when you have to get out the snarls. The wool locks have lots of snarls and murdochs. We're going to run it through the machine, and all the wire that's on the cylinders is going to straighten those fibers and more or less, make them parallel when it comes out the front end.