Mattress Quilting Lines

What it does

Quilting is what turns flat ticking fabric and loose foam or fiber into the padded panel that becomes the top, bottom and border of a mattress. It is not decoration. The stitch pattern controls how the fill is held in place, how the surface feels, how the panel wears, and how fast the whole factory can run, because every other machine in a mattress plant waits on the quilter.

How it works

Fabric, foam and backing are unrolled together and fed as a sandwich under a needle bar. A multi-needle machine carries a row of needles across the full width of the panel and moves the fabric under them in two axes to trace a programmed pattern, usually with a chainstitch because it tolerates the fill thickness. Because the needles are fixed and the fabric moves, pattern complexity costs nothing in mechanical terms. The quilted web then runs into an inline panel cutter that measures and cuts to size, and often into an automatic hemming or serging station that finishes the edge before the panels are stacked. The whole run can go from raw roll to stacked, sized, hemmed panels with one operator supervising.

The numbers

Multi-head machines with independently driven sewing heads can run heads at speeds in the region of 1,400 rpm. High-speed fixed-needle machines take a different route: putting sixteen needles in a tight arrangement shortens the thread path dramatically and roughly doubles the sewing speed of a conventional mattress quilter. Downstream, roll packing machines compress a finished mattress by up to about 90 percent of its volume on a 30 to 40 second cycle, at rates around 60 pieces an hour.

Who uses one

Mattress manufacturers, bedding and topper producers, furniture and upholstery plants, and technical textile converters.