VIDEO: The Bale Plucker In Action

We’ve been gearing up to it for some time now and today we finally got to see our bale plucker in action.

After several days of fine-tuning, we were able to line up the first bales of cotton and switch on the machine which will be first port of call for our cotton fibre from now on.

Getting to the stage of turning it on was a process of trial and error. Engineers had to first spend several days tweaking our air conditioning and fibre transportation system to get the conditions in Tower Mill’s fibre preparation room to the correct levels before the cotton bales could be brought in and opened.

On the ground-floor we need a humidity of 55% and a temperature of 25 degrees celcius.

The bale plucker opens and plucks the cotton fibre, moving along the bales and taking small sections from the top of each. It then sends the fibre through the transportation ducts to the blow room where it’s cleaned.