Alan Parker
Alan Parker is the inventor of the Roller-Air's intellectual property and in charge of the technological research & manufacturing design of the Roller-Air spin-box into a process capable of commercial exploitation.
"It is no good spinning high-quality yarns with an engineering system that isn't commercially profitable for the spinners who produce the yarn. That was the insurmountable problem with my first invention used as the basis for Platt Saco Lowell's manually-operated high speed spinning machine called the Masterspinner. Knitters and weavers made profit from the fabrics. But the spinners struggled to keep the Masterspinner's 144 spin-boxes producing same quality yarns. Operating costs were too high and more than swallowed up the benefit of the premium price they received for Masterspinner yarns."
"In a nutshell: The point of starting again from scratch was to develop a new spin-box with the same kind of internal technology, but one that had quality control features designed-in to ensure each unit would be 100% identical. By this I mean that during the assembly of spin-box components (one on top of another), each spin-box will finish up with an identical build-up of acceptable plus or minus engineering tolerance. The new design ensures that critically minute settings between internal components cannot be disturbed by the setting of the next component. I can easily demonstrate that no matter how many times the new spin-box is disassembled and reassembled it will continue to spin identical yarn from the same fibre input. The Masterspinner spin-box didn't have this guarantee."
"Uppermost in my mind at the start of the earlier technology's re-engineering phase was that a new spin-box's ability to be easily incorporated into a fully-automated machine is crucial to the commerciality of the spinning mills. If you click AUTOMATION the acrobat reader document will demonstrate the relative simplicity of what an automated robot will have to do to get the Mark 12 spin-box to splice (piece) yarn-ends together and re-commence spinning. Crucially important is that immediately a yarn-end break occurs, the spin-box itself automatically executes internal self-cleaning. This feature, allied to no need to power-down, reduces and greatly simplifies what the automated robot needs to do when a yarn-end break occurs on a rotor spin-box."
"The schematic above shows in simple terms the differences between (a) the two perforated technology of DREF whose short-staple rights I believe Schalfhorst owned, or licensed from the now defunct Fehrer AG (DREF) of Austria; (b) my 1970s technology in the Masterspinner; and (c) the new Roller-Air Mark 12 technology. The differences as to the angle at which the millions of minuscule fibres per second hit the minute fibre-twisting zone may seem insignificant, even to most yarn technologists. But it is the crucial factor in spinning soft-handle high-quality short-staple cotton yarns at very high production rates. How this is achieved is one of the unique and patentable aspects of the Roller-Air Mark 12 technology. This will, however, continue to remain secret until we are in a good enough commercial situation when we can let other textile engineers in on the secret know-how resulting from my many years of painstaking R&D."
