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Textile with fringles: Etracon

Etracon specializes in international trade of used carpet and velvet weaving machines in the textile industry. The company was founded in 1994 and has grown from a one-man business into a thriving international trading partner for used textile machinery. Etracon is worldwide, active in purchasing and sales of machinery. In addition, they advise and assist in technical challenges. For this Etracon has highly qualified technical personnel for both dismantling and loading, and installation and start-up of the machine. They guarantee that before the specialist leaves the machine is optimized in production and the local people have obtained the necessary instructions and training.

An application with fringes

Since a few years there was a demand of several customers for a machine for producing textile fringes with knots. In many companies, these textile knots are made manually, or pre-made tassels are produced by machines with very old technology, which cannot withstand any of today’s technical inspection on safety.

In order to satisfy the customer’s wishes, they asked for help of the company Fidomatic, also closely related with Etracon (son-father) and specialized in the design and manufacture of mechanical parts and the realization of special machines. Their objective is to offer customer-specific solutions, they present themselves as a full partner in the optimization of the production process of the customer. Or as stated on the website is “Fidomatic. For creative ideas that lead to ingenious solutions!” The customers are located in various industries: machinery manufacturers, assembling companies, rubber and plastics industry, aluminium-processing plants, construction, textile industry, etc.

Reliable, Safe, Easy

Etracon and Fidomatic gave the instruction “Build a reliable, safe node machine that is easy to set up for different types of fringes and required little aftercare. The fringes
should have the look of “Hand knotted machined.” On this base Fidomatic started to make first a detailed analysis of the knotting process. This initially seems simple, but is actually a very complex operation, partly by the desire to set-up quickly for a different types of fringes.

Eventually this led to a machine that uses 20 servomotors and 5 stepper motors to realize one knot per second. The machine is inserting wires to one side, to establish after a weaving and knotting technical operation a ready-made fringe in a continuous uninterrupted process. The knotting machine is separate from the carpet production, and the fringes are attached to the carpets by a special sewing machine IS 7010 PF (also distributed by Etracon).
The prototype, called Fantasia, was built and is running at the moment in Sint-Eloois-Winkel. It is very impressive to see how these 25 drives working together to achieve the desired product! The control is done by a PLC in which the programs for the various fringes are pre-stored. Some of the servomotors are equipped with Apex Dynamics gearboxes.

Interest from the market

From out of the market of quality carpets manufacturers, there is much interest in this new machine, it looks like a hole in the market. Customers from non-traditional export markets such as Iran, Uzbekistan, India, Egypt and Turkey are showing great interest, but also some customers in the home market of Belgium.
After the endurance test and the optimization process, the “Fantasia” was released, and the first machine is operating in Iran. Other customers have now also confirmed their orders, which means “Fantasia” is definitely available in the market.

More information about the companies can be found at www.etracon.be and www.fidomatic.be.

Press release Helmond, April 12, 2016