The hands know first

Our laboratory confirms what the floor already heard.

There is a sound that a batch of technical felt makes when something has gone wrong with it. Nobody has ever written that sound down. It does not appear in any ISO procedure, it is not on the test schedule, and you will not find it in a training manual. But somebody who has stood beside the needle-punch line for twenty years hears it, walks over, and stops the machine. They are right often enough that we stopped arguing about it a long time ago.

What happens next is that the laboratory confirms it. We run air permeability, weight and dimensional checks, tensile and bursting strength, and where the situation calls for it, FTIR spectroscopy and microscopic fibre analysis. The instruments give us the written record, which is what a customer eventually sees on a certificate. But the instruments are not what caught the problem. A person did. The instruments are the record; the ear is the alarm.

We think this is worth saying plainly on Vishwakarma Puja, because the day is usually treated as a day for machines. This morning at Indore the needle-punch line, the cutting tables and the stitching machines were cleaned, garlanded and left to rest. Tomorrow they go back to producing the felt that becomes a filter bag in a cement kiln, a steel smelter or an asphalt plant somewhere we will probably never visit.

They are very good machines and we have invested a great deal in them. But in four decades not one of them has ever stopped itself.

To every engineer, operator, fitter and technician across Indore, South Africa & Poland, and to everyone doing the same work in the plants we supply — a good Vishwakarma Puja.

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