for coarse and cheap yarn,
or it may be repeated a half dozen or more times to produce the finer and
more expensive products. The frame for each repetition is slightly
different, but several types may be isolated. They are, in the order of
their use, the drawing frame, the fly frame, or slubber, the intermediate
frame, and the roving and jack frames.

For fine counts the slivers from the comber, and for other grades that
which comes directly from the card, are taken, then to the drawing frame.
The slivers from the cans, six or eight in number, are fed through one
aperture, and pass, thus combined, between several (usually four) pairs
of rollers, so arranged that each succeeding pair revolves at a more
rapid rate than that which preceded it. The last pair in the series
revolve probably six or eight times as fast as the first pair. This
combination of rollers pulls constantly on the more or less irregular
slivers, rendering them always more nearly uniform in diameter and
density, the thickness of one of the entering slivers serving to
counterbalance the thinness of the other. The drawing frame consists
usually of four or five "heads," and the sliver, after it passes through
one of these "heads," is put through a second one, along with other
slivers, so that the doubling and redoubling goes on constantly. There is
an electric device to stop the machine when a sliver breaks, either at
the back or the front of the frame.

[Illustration: _Combers at work in a mill spinning fine counts_]

From the last head of the drawing frame, the sliver passes to the fly
frame or slubber, which not only continues the drawing and doubling,
usually between three pairs of rollers, but through the aid of a device
which gives the sliver a slight twist and winds it, for the first time,
upon a spindle. This device is known as the flyer, and is, roughly, a
U-shaped piece of metal, which, revolving, inverted, over the spindle,
gives the thread a slight lateral twist as it coils upon the spindle. The
latter also revolves, but with a diminishing motion so that the amount of
twist may be kept uniform as the diameter of the coil upon the spindle
increases. The sliver, now being twisted, is called a sliver no longer,
but the slubbing.

The slubbing is passed between the rollers in pairs, the emerging product
being less in diameter than the diameter of a single slubbing. The
machine combines the fourfold process of combination, attenuation,
twisting a