Textile Creels Maker Cygnet Texkimp Celebrates 50th Anniversary
Cygnet Texkimp, a manufacturer of creels for the textile and technical fibre industries is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
In the past 50 years, the UK company has expanded its portfolio for the composites and technical fibre industries including prepreg, coating, slitting, filament winding, automation, and end-of-life recycling solutions.
In the early 2000s, due to a steady increase in the size and weight of fibre bobbins, the company’s existing creel designs were not practical for existing handling technologies.
Unable to find the handling equipment it needed in the market, the company set about designing its own and the move would prove to be a key milestone in the company’s evolution.
Cygnet Texkimp has gone on to develop systems to wrap, pack and palletise bobbins of fibre, RFID, barcoding, vision and data capture capability, robotics, and auto guided vehicle (AGV) systems.
“It has been a hugely successful venture, with automation and handling solutions now making up around a third of the company’s revenue annually,” the company informed in a press release.
During the 2009 global recession and a slowdown for large capital equipment, the company worked with a long-term US customer to develop an improved solution to process carbon fibre prepregs.
This would herald the birth of a dedicated wide-web engineering team which has been responsible for developing new and unique solutions for coating, slitting, and laminating, as well as prepreg.
Over the next ten years, the company continued to strengthen its position in the fibre processing market with a series of ground-breaking new products providing previously unreachable capability.
In 2017, as a result of a successful Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Manchester, the company unveiled a robotic 3D winding machine capable of creating complex composite parts.
2021 brought the launch of its high-precision Slitter Spooler machine, which is used predominantly in the aerospace and automotive industries to slit and wind carbon fibre prepregs into high-accuracy tapes.
