Page 23 - Industrial Cutting of Textile Materials

10 Industrial Cutting of Textile Materials

2.5 The quality control of stored textile materials

Before the fabric is spread, the following operations should be performed: checks on
width and footage of every fabric roll, the quality control of fabric surface, determina-
tion of the number of colour shades, and inspection of colour fastness and shrinkage
level after washing and fusing. The control procedures required for specific textile ma-
terial are determined by the customer. Depending on the fabric type, price, and quality,
quality control may include all the delivered materials, or selective control only may
be carried out by looking at the sample fabric material.
Nowadays, fabric preparation procedures are simplified to reduce the production time
and the overall cost. The fabric footage is controlled only in situations when there is
uncertainty about the conformity of the data given on the fabric marking or shipping
documents. Visual determination of fabric faults and decisions on whether to leave or cut
out such faults are made during the spreading process (see Section 4.5). A separate flaw
rejection operation is only performed when the fabric is expensive and has many faults.
If serious quality problems are discovered during the fabric preparation process, the
following actions may be taken. Textile materials with serious and recurrent faults may
be returned to the manufacturer. In this situation, the manufacturer must be informed
about the problems during the claim acceptance period as prescribed in the purchase
contract. After the expiry of this period, the manufacturer is not obliged to accept any
quality claims. Lower quality fabrics are rarely sent back to the manufacturer as this
may delay the production process (a producer has to wait for new, good quality fabrics
to continue the work) that may give rise to late delivery dates for the finished goods.
This is not acceptable for either the customer or producer.
Textiles of lower quality that are still suitable for production are cut so as to ex-
clude the faults (see Section 4.5). Special markers for single plies (placed directly onto
a fabric) may be made for expensive fabrics. To continue working with low-quality
materials is the preferred solution as this has less effect on the production process
and delivery dates (the work process is slower and more labour-intensive, and fewer
articles are cut because of the faults, but production remains continuous).

2.6 Influence of textile faults on the industrial
manufacture of garments

It should be noted that seeking the maximum reduction of preparation processes is not
a positive trend in current garment production. Unfortunately, low-quality textile ma-
terials are often supplied, and the spreading and cutting time therefore increase with
the potential to produce faulty articles, giving rise to disagreements between customer
and producer.
The faults encountered in textile materials are varied: soiling (e.g. dirt, oil, and
paint), thickened fibres and threads, breaks in knitted fabric loops, faults in the dyeing
and finishing processes (differing colour shades on either side of the fabric or within
one roll and differences in shape and areas of colour), and mechanical faults that occur