What a Yarn Clearer Setting Is Worth

How to read this sheet

The rule is worth more than the number. Take the setting you run and the next tighter one on your own trial. Divide the extra cuts by the faults the tighter setting catches, multiply by what a cut costs, and that is what a fault has to be worth downstream before tightening pays. It is a single line of arithmetic, it can be done at the machine, and it is the question a clearer setting has been asking since the day it was commissioned. Note what it does not depend on: not the tonnage, not the count, not how big the mill is. Those decide how much the answer is worth, not which way it goes. Where the number nobody has is. Cuts per hundred kilometres comes off the machine. Faults escaping does not, and every mill that has never measured it is running a setting chosen by somebody who also never measured it. A classimat on the wound cone is the direct route; counting objectionable faults per hundred metres of inspected fabric and working back through the fabric construction is the slower one and is usually available for nothing, because the inspection is already being done. Estimate it if you must, but estimate it separately for a loose and a tight setting, because it is the difference between them that the whole sheet turns on. Why one setting is usually the expensive part. The clearer is set for the machine, and the machine winds for everything the mill sells. Greige yarn going into bag cloth carries almost no penalty for a fault and pays full price for every cut; white shirting is the reverse by a factor of thirty. A single setting is a compromise nobody chose, and on the seeded mill it is correct for one end use out of four. Segregating is not free - it means the clearer settings become part of the production plan and somebody has to change them with the lot - but it costs an operator instruction rather than capital, which is rare. What is not modelled. Splice quality is treated as one number for all settings, which is generous to tight settings: a clearer that cuts more often also splices more often into yarn it has already weakened. Foreign fibre is treated as another fault class rather than the different animal it is - one dark fibre in a white shirting can fail a garment outright, and if that is your exposure then price it as its own end use rather than averaging it in. And nothing here says the trial itself was run properly; two settings compared on different lots of cotton are not comparable at all.