160 THE SHEEP AND WOOL INDUSTRY 



This is done in the same way with both painted and sweated 

 skins. The men employed pulling the wool off the skins are 

 called " pullers." The first thing they do on receiving the skins 

 from the sweat-house or the paint stack is to class them into all 

 their different grades or qualities from Merino to Lincoln. The 

 puller usually classes the skins into the following sorts, taking 

 care to keep the length of each class even, as it would not do to 

 place the wool off very short Merino skins with that off long- 

 woolled ones. 



MERINO SKINS. Consisting of all skins with Merino wool. 



COMEBACK SKINS. Consisting of all skins with 58*5 quality wool. 



I-BRED SKINS. Consisting of all skins with 56*3 quality wool. 



-BRED SKINS. Consisting of all skins with 50*5 quality wool. 



f-BRED SKINS. Consisting of all skins with 46*3 quality wool. 



LINCOLN SKINS. Consisting of all skins with 36*3 and 40*8 quality wool. 



Each class or lot of skins is pulled by itself, the puller 

 cleaning up all the wool after pulling each lot of skins so that it 

 will not get mixed with that of another quality. The wool has to 

 be sorted by the puller as he takes it off the skin. He takes all 

 the bulky wool from the centre portions of the fleece for the firsts, 

 the seconds consisting of all shabby wools about the edges of the 

 skin (see diagrams). Very often when sorting the wool on a skin 

 that on the britch end will be a grade coarser than the wool on 

 other parts of it ; so on a f -bred skin you will often get wool 

 off the britch that will have to be put into the Lincoln quality, 

 and so on. All tar and other brands have to be removed from the 

 skin. The tops of staples which are marked with the brands are 

 cut off. Tar brands are kept separate from raddle brands. The 

 burring machine sometimes fails to remove all the burr, and the 

 puller will have to keep any burry wool separate from the free. 

 The puller has several baskets around him into which he throws 

 the various qualities of wool he gets off each lot of skins. The 

 wool is taken out and dried in the sun ; though in most cases it is 

 taken direct to the scouring machine and scoured as it is. All the 

 wool taken from the skins has to be scoured, as the cold-water 

 soakings it has gone through will not remove the yolk from it. 



