For many years tufted articles have been produced on machines utilizing a bank of needles which pierce a foundation or backing sheet to form loops or tufts of yarn through the surface of the backing sheet. Materials such as carpets can be produced on such machines at a generally lower cost and greater throughput than woven carpet pro- duced on weaving looms.

Specially constructed Wilton weaving looms have been used to produce articles in a face-to-face configuration. In this process a double structure is woven and then split into two cut pile fabrics. An advantage of this type of construction is that production through- put is increased to nearly double that of standard looms. A further advantage is that the dead pile yarn (per unit area) woven into the backings of two patterned fabrics made on a face-to-face loom is lower than that of comparable fabrics woven on standard looms.

Examples of tufting machines for producing a double plush-like product such as a car- pet and pile upholstery fabric are described in British Patent specification No. 821702 and US Patent Specification No. 5,357,886. A disadvantage of the invention described in specification No. 821702 is that a locking stitch is required in order to lock the tufts to the backing sheet. The same disadvantage applies to the invention described in the US specification and it also has a complicated needle support arrangement required to overcome the disadvantage mentioned in the prior German patent specification No.

1785451 B. The German specification requires the needles to be spaced apart to allow for separate grippers to be included for each row of needles. This results in a carpet with a large spacing between adjacent tufts.

An object of the present invention is to provide a method of producing tufted articles or products using a face-to-face technique to increase significantly production throughput

and to offer a useful alternative choice in the production of carpet or blankets or other tufted products.

An object of the present invention is therefore to provide a tufting machine with a mini- mum of spacing between adjacent tufts without the need for the added complication of bulky mechanisms for the insertion of locking stitches in the backing sheet.

Another object of the invention is to reduce the dead yarn per unit area (as a percent- age of total pile yarn weight) in the back of fabrics produced on double sliding needle bar and other patterned tufted fabrics.

According to a first aspect of the invention there is provided a method of producing tufted products including the steps of : -installing a second set of reed fingers relative to a tufting machine; -optionally installing lower presser foot ; -feeding to the tufting machine a pair of backing sheets with the second set of reed fin- gers positioned between the backing sheets; -operating the tufting machine in normal manner to form through the backing sheets, a face-to-face structure without the inclusion of any backing stitch and in which the lower presser foot if included temporarily holds the yarn during needle retraction; -cutting or dividing the face-to-face structure to form two separate tufted products.

According to the second aspect of the invention there is provided a tufting machine adapted to produce either a cut pile and a loop pile tufted product or two cut pile prod- ucts.

According to a third aspect of the invention there is provided a retrofit kit for a tufting machine including a second bank of reed fingers adapted to be positioned between a supply mechanism or mechanisms adapted to supply a pair of backing sheets and a cutting or slicing mechanism adapted to split a face-to-face structure produced by the modified tufting machine.

According to yet another aspect of the invention there is provided a tufted article or product produced according to the method or on the machine as hereinbefore defined.

Further aspects of the invention which should be considered in all its novel aspects will become apparent from the following description which is given by way of example only.

Examples of the invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings in which : Figure 1 shows diagrammatically a vertical section through a basic configuration of tufting machine adapted to produce tufted products according to the present invention; Figure 2 shows a section similar to that shown in Figure 1 and adapted for pro- ducing two cut pile tufted products; and Figure 3 shows a section similar to that shown in Figure 2 and modified to pro- duce in a single operation both a cut pile and loop pile product.

A standard tufting machine (not shown) incorporates yarn or fiber stream feed mecha- nisms from a creel or beam adapted to feed yarns to an elongated needle block in which a series of needles are mounted. The needles reciprocate vertically between spaced reed fingers over which a backing sheet of fabric passes.

Existing tufting machines include a presser foot adapted to assist formation of loops or cut loops when a needle is raised. A looper is also included to retain loops formed in the tufting process.

It is envisaged that the present invention can be provided for incorporation into new constructions of tufting machine or as a retrofit kit for existing tufting machinery because of its simplifie form without the need for a locking stitch mechanism and is associated yarn feed mechanism.

The present invention is also suitable for incorporation into new constructions of ma- chinery for patterned tufted fabrics (e. g. double sliding needlebar machinery) and as a retrofit kit for the same.

In Figure 1 is shown a fairly basic configuration of tufting machine generally indicated by arrow 1 with yarn feed arrow 2 from a creel (not shown). Existing reed fingers (arrow 3) operate with an upper presser foot 4. A lower presser foot 5 has been added for the purposes of this invention. The lower presser foot 5 may be used to activate fiber bonding or a coating on the backing sheet.

The backing sheet may be any of a wide variety of known backing fabrics and may also incorporate a bonding fiber or coating which after, e. g. a heat or other treatment stage improves the anchorage of the tufted pile yarns in the final product. The coating may alternatively be applied in a subsequent processing stage.

The lower backing sheet may be a new type of material which has a raised surface that interacts with the backing loop so as to resist extraction of the tuft and to improve the tuft anchorage of the pile yarn.

The tufting machine incorporates loopers 6 (only one of a bank of which can been seen). In this example a loop pile looper is included. This could be substituted with a cut pile looper depending on the final constructions to be produced by the equipment. A feed supply for a backing sheet 7 is also included.

In addition to the above standard equipment there are incorporated a second set of reed fingers 8. The second set of reed fingers 8 may be mounted on a bridge which is posi- tioned so that it is positioned above relative to the standard reed finger 3. The distance or height between the reed fingers 3 and 8 is adjustable to set the overall height be- tween the two backing sheets 7,9 and thus to determine the combined pile height of the two carpets produced by this method. In this construction the lower edge of the second set of reed fingers 8 acts like a presser foot to maintain separation of the backing fabrics and to resist the lower backing sheet being drawn upward by the retracting needles.

The backing sheets 7,9 are either fed from a single double backing roll (not shown) which feeds the backing sheets to the tufting machine. Alternatively and preferably as shown a set of double input feeding rollers 10 are used to feed the backing sheets. This necessitates the addition of an addition set of feeding rollers. The lower backing sheet

may have a bonding fiber or coating pre-applied or applied, to its lower surface, during the tufting process.

The tufting machine has preferably situated relative thereto a cutting device 11 adapted to divide the face-to-face tufted structure into two tufted products.

In Figure 2 is shown a tufted product and a mechanism for producing two cut pile fabrics 12,13 utilizing a mechanism similar to that shown in Figure 1. In this case the separa- tion between the two sets of reed fingers is set so that the separation between the lower and upper backing sheets is equal to the sum of the intended pile heights of the two fabrics produced by splitting the double structure. The double structure may be split asymmetrically to produce two fabrics with non-equal pile heights.

Shown in Figure 3 is a similar mechanism to that shown in Figure 2 wherein the separa- tion of the reed finger 3,8 is set at a value equal to the pile height of the cut pile fabric plus a short length of backstitch. This backstitch with the subsequent addition of an ad- hesive such as a latex adhesive assists anchorage of the tufts to the backing sheet. The use of loop pile loopers produces loop pile tufts adjacent to one of the backing sheets and cut pile tufts in the upper backing sheet. Utilizing this set up, a cut pile fabric 12 and loop pile tufted fabric product 14 are formed in a single operation. Generally the loopers will also be moved (downwards) away from the lower backing to make a longer pile.

Thus by this invention there is provided a method and mechanism for producing tufted fabrics which at least increases throughput of a tufting machine to a point where signifi- cant increases in production and cost savings are obtained.

The construction of the lower carpet, either cut or loop, is quite different to the upper carpet and/or normal tufted carpets-it may be a completely new type of tufted carpet construction.

When applied to tufting machinery for producing patterned fabrics the invention provides a method whereby the dead pile yarn will be entirely contained in the back of the upper

(cut pile) fabric. As the amount of dead pile yarn will be identical to that contained in a single fabric of the same pattern tufted on a standard tufter the percentage of dead yarn to total pile yarn weight (per unit area of fabric produced) will be halved by the invention.

Where in the description known integers have been used, it is envisaged that their equivalents may be substituted therefore even though they are not individually set forth herein.

Particular examples of the invention have been described and it is envisaged that im- provements and modifications can take place without departing from the scope thereof.

List of Reference Numerals 1 arrow 2 yarn feed arrow 3 reed finger 4 upper presser foot 5 lower presser foot 6 looper 7 backing sheet 8 reed finger 9 backing sheet 10 input feeding rollers 11 cutting device 12 cut pile fabric 13 cut pile fabric 14 loop pile tufted fabric product