First phase – The Bale Breaker

The bale breaker takes an unpackaged bale of raw fibres and pre-opens the fibres ready for dust extraction. The freshly opened material is drawn, by large extractor fan, from the back of the machine and transferred through an automated piping system to…

Second phase – Dust Extraction

The dust extraction unit filters out around 70% of the natural dust contained within natural fibres and once the material reaches the required level it again passes automatically out into phase three…

Third phase – The Fearnought

Pennine Textiles and Recycling has five Fearnought machines (on 3 systems – used to avoid cross contamination) each of which uses thousands of sharp teeth, a large cylinder and several strippers and workers for disentangling. This further open the fibres to the required consistency before passing the new, fuller fibre on to phase four…

Fourth phase – The Atomist

The Atomist machine takes the fibres and adds oil, anti-allegry additives, fire-retardency additives or other lubricants as desired by the customer. These additives are usually supplied by the customer to assist the next stage of the product making process. Pennine Blending works to incredibly high tolerances, in litres or millilitres per minute, to ensure 100% consistency from batch to batch. The material is then extracted, via sanitised ducting, to the next stage of the process…

Fifth Phase – The Blending Bin

Our fibre blending bins take the fibre and cross blends it a number of times (to the specification as required by the customer) using a telescopic cyclone within the bin to blend the fibre  evenly. The cyclone  takes around 3 minutes from front to back, which enables Pennine to work to most reasonable timescales on even the largest batches. Each bin has a capacity (for wool fibre) of around 10 tonnes, but as each blend is identical to the last, we have no restrictions to the maximum overall size of a blend.

The resultant blended fibre then moves out, using an automated bin emptier, to either another Fearnought for additional fibre opening or onto the baling process through our network of ducting…

Sixth, and Final phase – The Semi Automatic Baling Press

The final fibre blend is now baled off into baling bags, in sizes ranging from 100 kilo to 400 kilo, marked for the specific customer and stored ready for dispatch. Every blend, every bale, is identical – from one to one hundred.