Picanol, a technological market leader in airjet and rapier weaving machines, will be showcasing a wide variety of new airjet and rapier weaving machines at ITMA 2015 that takes place in Milan next month.

The year 2015 sees Picanol celebrating 40 years of manufacturing rapier weaving machines with the global launch of its new OptiMax-i and TerryMax-i machines. Another highlight at the upcoming fair will be the TERRYplus Summum.

“The year 2015 means that it is exactly 40 years ago that we launched our very first weaving machine with a rapier insertion. Since the launch of the first rapier all the time ago, we have sold over 90,000 rapier machines throughout the world. As our very first rapier was presented to the world at the ITMA Milano fair in 1975, we are delighted that Milan will once again be the stage for displaying some of our rapier innovations,” explained Johan Verstraete, VP Sales, Marketing & Services at Picanol.

New rapier machine with enhanced features

Highlights of the new rapier are said to include the increased performance, rigid construction, new applications, intelligent energy efficiency, improved ergonomics and user-friendliness. The OptiMax-i is available in reed widths ranging from 190 to 540cm.

Thanks to its optimized rapier drives it remains the fastest rapier machine with the Guided Gripper system (GC) and the most versatile one with the Free Flight system (FF), the company reports. The Guided Positive Gripper (GPG) system has been developed for dedicated technical fabrics. Thanks to the revolutionary Free Flight Positive Gripper system (FPG), weavers are now able to combine and freely mix the most challenging filling yarns.

New weaving machines for weaving terry cloth

The ITMA fair will also see Picanol presenting its new TerryMax-i (rapier) and the new TERRYplus Summum (airjet) weaving machines, both of which have been developed for terry cloth.

The direct electronic drive of the cloth fell mechanism is said to guarantee a perfect pile formation and enable weavers to not only program the pile height loop by loop, but also to program the pre-beat-up distance of every single filling yarn, which in turn can enable endless design possibilities. Features include OptiSpeed, pile height monitoring and needle roller control.

www.picanol.be