Grane Mill Engine, Boiler restoration with other engines on site.
"The Steam power plant at Grane Mill is owned by the Heritage Trust for the North West on whose behalf the Grane Mill Preservation Group volunteers and associates are working to conserve and repair this unique and important heritage asset to give it the long term future it deserves."
The weaving manufacturing mill
A weaving mill is where the spun cotton yarn from the spinning mill is prepared, threaded into the looms and transformed into cloth. In the Lancashire Cotton Industry the term ‘Manufacturing’ always referred to the weaving of cloth, hence the company name, “The Grane Manufacturing Co Ltd”.
See further pages for the different processes that were carried out in the weaving mill.
The above drawing is of the mill as it was when originally designed and built in 1906/7. The weaving shed was planned for extension from the start and this was carried out six years later in 1912 at the South side of the shed, along the bottom of the drawing. At its height the mill had around 1100 looms when the second boiler was also added, requiring the engine to develop at least 550hp.
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The spun cotton yarn wound onto cones, cheeses or warping beams entered through the twist department which was where the warping beams and the spun cotton would be stored to the top right of the drawing. For special orders and samples the cones or cheeses would be rewound onto creel bobbins and warping beams made in the mill from a warping creel.
The prepared warping beams would then enter the tape sizing dept., where the yarn ends from 6 to 8 warping beams would be combined before being passed through a steam heated trough of flour or starch size to strengthen the warp yarn. This would then be dried over steam-heated cylinders before being wound onto each weaver’s beam to fit specific looms. The sized weavers’ warp beams would then go for looming where the warp ends would be drawn into the heald eyes of the heddle shafts and entered into the reed and tied off, ready to be taken into the weaving shed for gaiting up the looms.
Alternatively, where a repeat cloth order for the new beams was the same as that on looms that have just woven out, the beam would enter the twisting dept. so that the warp ends on the new beam could be knotted (twisted) onto the existing ends of the still threaded heddle shafts and reed carefully taken off the looms that had just woven out. This saved the time consuming process of drawing thousands of ends through the heald eyes and entering them into the reeds again from scratch and also virtually eliminated the risk of threading errors. This process would have been carried out by hand originally, then with hand held knotters before the Barber knotter was invented which semi-automatically tied all the ends together mechanically so saving even more time.
The prepared weavers’ beams, neatly threaded into heald shafts and reeds, would be rolled into the weaving shed on bogies when ready for gaiting up the empty looms via the gearing alley doors from the Twisting dept. Weft yarn would be prepared in the winding room by re-winding from spun cones or cheeses onto weft pirn tubes of paper or wood to suit the shuttles being used and the filled pirns would be put into weft tins to be taken to the looms by the same route.
Depending on the quality and count of the yarn it could take approximately 2 weeks to weave a full warp through a power loom, producing up to a mile of cloth in the process, maybe 16 or 17 pieces.
Once the cloth was woven on a loom it would be removed in piece lengths, units of usually 100yards a piece, and taken to the warehouse again through the gearing alley, to the right of the drawing, for inspection, plaiting, packing and despatch to then be shipped out via the loading bay. Empty pirns would go back to the winding department and the empty cone and cheese centres for the spun cotton from the spinning mill would be taken to the warehouse and returned to the spinning mill as they were their property and usually stamped with the name of the spinning mill.