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In the long journey from fleece to yarn, there’s one step that rarely gets the spotlight - but without it, our worsted-spun yarns wouldn’t have their signature smoothness, drape, or strength. In fact, they wouldn’t exist at all. Meet Fish: our gillbox, our workhorse, and one of the grumpiest machines in the mill.
Fish doesn’t spin. He doesn’t card. He doesn’t comb. But he does something utterly vital in the middle of it all. His job is aligning, blending, and drafting wool into perfectly prepped sliver. You won’t find a skein of our yarn that hasn’t passed through him several times.
If you imagine combing your hair, you’re not far off. A gillbox draws sliver (that’s continuous rope-like fibre) through rows of sharp little pins mounted in what are called faller bars. These pins comb the fibre in one direction, then the other, slowly untangling every U-shaped curl and aligning each strand to lie neatly alongside its neighbours.
Elsewhere in the world, you’ll usually hear this machine called a pin drafter - which, to be fair, makes a lot more sense. It drafts fibre. Through pins. There you go. But in the UK “gillbox” is the term that stuck. It comes from the French word aiguille, meaning needle or needle point - hence the pins doing all the work.
But that’s only the start. Fish also blends - pulling in multiple slivers (usually four to ten) and averaging them into one smooth output. Then, he drafts - drawing the fibre to just the right weight and thickness, ready for spinning.
At Garthenor, we run each batch through the gillbox three or four times after carding, then again three or four times after combing. By the end of it, you’re left with something almost unrecognisably refined compared to where it started: soft, silky, consistent, and ready for the spinning frame.
Fish is a 1975 GN5 screw gillbox made by NSC in France, and he arrived at our mill from a quiet corner of the Czech Republic where he hadn’t run in years. The rubber had perished, the faller bars were rusted beyond any use, and more than a few parts were missing. Rebuilding him was a team effort, and one we’ll never forget. (Special thanks to John Arbon for lending some wisdom and encouragement.)
Why “Fish”? Well - he’s a gillbox. You do the punning.
Screw gillboxes like Fish are a little older and slower than modern chain gills, but they’re mechanically simpler and much gentler on the fibre. That suits us perfectly. He likes to run slowly - between 50 and 80 metres per minute is his happy place - and every batch gets its own custom setup. Draft ratios, tension settings, feed speeds… no digital displays here. Just gears, chains, and some very careful maths.
And while Fish might be a vital part of our worsted prep, he’s not without his quirks. He doesn’t like fine fibres. He’s loud enough to require ear defenders. He hates being left under pressure overnight (that one’s on us - we’ve learned our lesson). And sometimes, when he’s in a mood, he’ll wrap fibre so tightly around a roller you’d swear it was felted on. But every time something goes wrong, we learn a bit more about what makes him tick.
Sometimes otherwise smooth gilling is interrupted by fibre lapping around one of the rollers (look at the smaller of the metal rollers)
On this occasion, Fish decided to just sort of chunder out this mess of fibre.
Everything went wrong here - that certainly isn't he smooth and consistent sliver we need.
What he brings to the yarn
The results of gilling are subtle but profound. Run your hands through a sliver before and after a pass through Fish and you’ll feel it: smoother, straighter, more refined. Multiply that effect over eight passes, with combing in between, and you’ve got fibre that’s about as perfect as it can be. For worsted spinning - where precision matters - it’s everything.
That’s why Fish is central to our process. Every skein of yarn that comes out of the mill carries his quiet signature: a little more evenness, a little more strength, a little more grace.
Come and meet him
If you’ve ever visited us on a mill tour or open weekend, you might have seen Fish in action - his pins rising and falling, his slivers gently gliding through. If not, don’t worry. We’ll be sharing more of our machines soon. They’ve all got names. They’ve all got stories.
And like any good team, they all rely on one another. But some jobs - like aligning the tiniest fibres into perfectly parallel order - are best left to the gillbox with a bit of grit.
Thanks, Fish.