Rubber Thread: One Long Strand Cut Spirally from Cured Sheet (Gibbons 1934)

The rubber in elastic webbing and braided elastic is not spun: it is cut. A thin cured sheet is wound on a big drum and a small fast circular knife, walked across the drum by a lead screw, cuts it into one long square strand. How fast the knife travels sets the thread's width. This is how Edwin Gibbons described the American practice in 1934. Source: E. J. Gibbons, "Rubber Thread in Narrow Fabrics", India Rubber World, 1 July 1934. Starting from our cured rubber sheet and the tools are ours. Picture drawn by Youblob.