Inside The Factory - Series 8

Episode
Episode 7 - Carpets
Broadcast Info
2024 (59 mins)
Description
Gregg Wallace explores the Axminster factory in Devon to reveal how 46,000 square metres of carpet are produced every year. He’s following production of one of their best sellers, the Havana Diamond Steel wool carpet. Normally Gregg would start his journey at the intake area of the factory with a delivery of a key ingredient. But here, it’s a little different, as he’s heading straight to source! He visits a nearby farm which is in the throes of sheep shearing. 20% of the factory’s wool comes from a breed called the Grey Faced Dartmoor. The wool is bagged up and co-presenter Cherry Healey takes over the process, as it’s sent to a nearby dyehouse to transform it into coloured yarn. Cherry sees how the wool travels through a seventeen-stage process which takes it from thick fleece to yarn. Managing Director of the dyehouse, Stephen Norris shows her how it is plunged into the dye to emerge the perfect shade of ‘Station Blue’ for Gregg’s carpet. At the carpet factory in Devon, Gregg collects the four different colours he needs - blue, green, grey and silver - on spools of yarn called ‘cheeses’. Each one holds around 5,000 metres of yarn, the equivalent to one sheep! After learning about the design of the carpet, Gregg heads to one of the factory’s twelve enormous looms. With 40,000 working parts from front to back, the looms weave two metres of carpet an hour. Steve Marks helps Gregg load the yarn onto spools and explains the workings of an incredibly complicated piece of equipment called a smart creel. The job of this intriguing machine is to sort out all the different lengths of yarn and feed them through to the front of the loom, where Gregg meets Master Weaver, Mike Hutchings. At the front of the loom lengths of cotton are held under tension and laid lengthwise, ready to form the base of the carpet. This is known as the warp. Gregg presses a button and the huge loom kicks into action. Lengths of jute, known as weft, shoot back and forth creating a woven base. At the same time, the clever loom cuts off sections of woollen yarn and threads them into the base, creating the tufts of the carpet. Gregg is astounded at the complexity of the engineering that produces this everyday item. With the carpet woven, it’s given a quick haircut in another huge machine called a shearer, removing the top two millimetres of the tufts with supersharp rotating blades, to leave it feeling smooth and soft. Before any carpet can leave the factory, it must pass under the gaze of a very discerning critic. Emma Tytherleigh is the Head Carpet Inspector and has been working at the factory for 34 years. Gregg watches in amazement as she identifies imperfections in the carpet and fixes them by hand. As the carpet is cut into five metre lengths, Gregg grasps the chance to take off his shoes and have a little dance on it for the first time. Then it’s wrapped up and loaded onto a waiting van alongside rolls of other carpets destined for homes across the UK and Ireland. Elsewhere in the episode, Cherry Healey visits the Good Housekeeping Institute to learn the science behind the best ways to remove stubborn stains from carpet, pitching her home remedies against the expert’s methods to tackle stains from butter, milk and red wine. Historian Ruth Goodman learns how the ground-breaking methods of a Devon-based carpet maker in the 18th century revolutionised intricate carpet making; and explores the rise and fall of the hard-wearing flooring linoleum.
Genre
Science; Technology

How to cite this record

The Open University, "Inside The Factory - Series 8". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/248207 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)