Testfabrics Inc. 2003 AATCC

	Back In Greenville! Testfabrics, Inc. is glad to be able to back exhibiting at this year’s I.C.E. and looks forward to seeing our clients and friends attending the conference this year. On hand to meet with you and to discuss your needs for textile products and services are: Mr. W. Finley Klaas, Principal and Director of Operations Mr. Shawn Meeks, Laboratory Manager and Technical Service Specialist Mr. Muhammad Abid Hafeez, Technical Assistant and Webmaster Mr. Thomas A. Klaas sends his best regards to all his friends attending this year’s conference and regrets he will be unable to participate due to other personal commitments. He is well and is currently ‘holding down the fort’ while his associates ‘work the crowd’. He looks forward to being back next year to renew his many personal friendships developed through his long relationship with the AATCC staff and its members. This is a very difficult time in our domestic textile industry and we will miss the many suppliers, customers and friends that we have made through our 60+ years of active textile industry participation. We hope the best for all those whose firms have closed or moved operations off-shore and whose jobs have been eliminated. We pray for them all and wish them all the very best in their transition to new jobs and industries. We were very fortunate to have worked so closely with so many of them. We feel extremely fortunate to be ‘still standing’ in a textile world so radically changed from what we all knew and in such a short time. We continue to strive and adapt to bring our clients the best possible products to satisfy their needs for textile testing materials and related services. That’s our job, we work for all of you. Thank you. As one of the earlier principals of Testfabrics, Inc. used to tell us, especially in times of business uncertainty, ‘the only thing constant in business is change’. How you adapt and react to the changes in your business world will determine your business future. Testfabrics, Inc. continues to evolve with each adaptation it makes to maintain and to grow in its business life. The challenges are never ending but the rewards are still possible to achieve for successfully meeting those challenges through hard work, being prepared and dedication to basic business principles. A Success Story of Perseverance Testfabrics, Inc. has participated faithfully in AATCC’s ‘student intern’ program. We have always appreciated the opportunity to get to know the many students who spend time with us and we have maintained contact with some of them as they develop in their careers. In 2001, we once again had several bright and interesting interns including Muhammad Abid Hafeez, then a student at Clemson. He kept in contact with us in his pursuit of getting a full time job after his graduation. He was in the right place at the right time, not always something you can manage to accomplish, but when you are, stick to it. A position became open in early 2003 and his educational qualifications and previous work experience made him the most viable candidate for the job of an all around technical assistant. To his credit (and the company’s benefit) he has literally ‘thrown himself’ into the job and has done extremely well. He has learned the true meaning of ‘multi-tasking’ the old fashioned way-by doing it, daily. We look forward to continuing to work with ‘Abe’ as he is known to us and we are more than confident that he will be a definitive asset to the textile industry throughout his career. We hope you have the opportunity to meet him and get to know him during this conference and other future industry events. Fiber Industry Stops Staple Fiber Di-Acetate Production While this little known fact doesn’t mean much to 99.99% of the textile world, in our little niche it is big news. We have used spun di-acetate yarn as a component in the production of our AATCC and ISO multifiber fabrics for decades. We have a limited amount remaining for production and will shortly be changing over to using a filament di-acetate yarn in place of the spun yarn. Our evaluations have found the filament yarn we have elected to use produces only nominally different staining results. We had to make this same kind of change from a spun tri-acetate yarn to a filament tri-acetate when the fiber producers ceased to manufacture the tri-acetate staple about 15 years ago. That change caused no problems for our consumers performing the 95’C European colorfastness to washing tests that used multifiber fabric #41 with the filament tri-acetate component. We had presented supporting laboratory data for this change to AATCC RA 59 during the last committee meetings in RTP, May ’03. AATCC should be making an announcement along these lines shortly. If you would like some samples of the new construction using the filament di-acetate yarn, please let us know. New Loom Working Hard Last year at this time, we had just had a new Dornier loom installed in our mill to produce the full width multifiber fabrics. We are pleased to advise you that this loom is fully operational and producing quality material in keeping with the manufacturer’s claims. It has significantly increased our productivity. The machine produces material up to 72 inches wide and this has allowed us to change the finished width of AATCC/ISO Multifiber Fabrics #1, #10 and #10A to 34 inches. We have adjusted these multifiber fabric prices to reflect this new width. We still produce 45 inch goods as well, priced accordingly. Another Needle Loom on Line We recently activated another of our needle looms to produce the warp stripe multifiber fabric products. These products provide much more individual ‘dimensional stability’ to the multifiber fabric test specimen. If you are interested in seeing some samples of the warp stripe products, especially the 2 inch wide ribbon form of multifiber fabric #10 known as multifiber fabric #10N, please let us know. #10N is one of the best kept secrets of the colorfastness world, if you do any kind of colorfastness testing using multifiber fabric #10 pieces, we invite you to consider #10N. We are sure you’ll find it easier to use, interpret and mount. Oh yes, it’s also cheaper. Hmm, better and cheaper? Too good to be true? Believe it this time. New 2003-2004 Technical Catalog Available The catalog is always a big undertaking and we have just finished our latest one. Abe and Shawn worked many long hours on this edition and we feel they have out a great job. There are several new additions of piece goods, products and services for digital printing, expanded product offerings including auxiliary materials needed to perform many industry and individual corporate tests, soil test media and more. We have a new test ribbon for the calibration of the flex testers in ASTM D . Please make sure you pick your copy up at our booth or contact us to have one sent to you. Webmaster Hard at Work One of Abe’s passions is the Internet. Every conversation we had prior to hiring him included his desire to reconstruct our web page. He got his wish. He has been working on this and is nearing completion. Our web page is still up and functioning in the meantime. We are all excited to see the results, we have had a few sneak previews and are impressed. Continued Development in Digital Printing We jumped into this new technology feet first when the first machines began to appear. We have great prepared for print grounds and we have the ability to pre-treat piece goods for digital printing with dyes. Several of the design schools have this new equipment and there is constant activity and development in the industry. We are very glad to playing a part in this field. If you have some needs in digital textile printing and need some help, let us know, perhaps we can help. The new catalog lists some of our stock pre-treated grounds. Shawn pre-treats goods routinely in pour Philadelphia plant, please discuss your needs for pre-treatment application with him. We are also working on providing the commercial steaming and washing services. If you are interested in having this service available, please let us know. New Flex Test Ribbon Now Available We have a new filament di-acetate ribbon, our style Tape #10, that is used to calibrate the flex testers used in ASTM . Dr. Patti Annis of the University of Georgia has been instrumental in bring this new ribbon into use. We thank her for your input and support. New Lot 6 Polystyrene Plastic Chips for SAE/IFAI Weatherometer Testing A new lot 6 of the popular polystyrene chip used for automotive exposure testing has been approved and found to be very close in performance to the previous lot 5. New data sheets accompany each order for these chips. Expanded Listing of CFT, EMPA and ‘wfk’ Soil Test Cloth and Related Products This new catalog includes several new items from our European associates at CFT, EMPA and ‘wfk’. If you are involved in detergency testing, please take sometime to review this section of the catalog. Testfabrics, Inc. Soil Test Cloth We are still facing some production problems with our printed soil test cloths. We continue to work on a solution and hope to have this resolved soon. In the meantime, we have some alternatives to offer our clients in place of some of the material we have not been able to produce. Please contact us to discuss these alternatives. New Agents in Egypt, Argentina, Colombia We are very pleased to announce we have the following new agents selling our products and services in: MicroScale Chemistry Experiment for Freshman Chemistry Our good friend, Dr. Mordechai Livneh, of the chemistry department of Bar Ilan University in Israel has kindly written an experiment that helps instructors teaching college freshman chemistry. We have all the necessary fabric pieces and the various dyes used to illustrate chemical properties made evident in the experiment. A copy of the experiment is available at no charge by emailing Dr. Livneh: livnehm@mail.biu.ac.il Dr. Livneh has presented this experiment at several international workshops for chemistry educators and has received worldwide acclaim for its value in teaching. Sample sheets and price lists available on request Our Continued Commitment to Serve Our Customers We are a textile company working on the behalf of our many different client groups, the least of which is not the textile industry itself. We recognize changes in our industry and deal with them one by one. We are here to help you do the best job you can do and with the best materials for doing that job. Please contact us with any problems in your area of activity, we will try our level best to help you. We have been successfully trying for over 60 years.