While we expect new equipment to work well right away, this is not always the case with a new pair of hand cards. The wire teeth of the carding cloth may have tiny burrs on the cut ends of the wire and these little burrs will catch the wool fibers and prevent them from transferring smoothly between the cards. Because of this, it’s best to condition new cards before using them. Fortunately, this is easy to do and is well worth the minimal time spent.

All that is needed to condition a pair of hand cards and remove those burrs is a bit of steel wool. This wool comes, of course, from those hard rockin’ heavy metal steel wool sheep and is a much coarser grade than Braid...... well no, actually, steel wool comes from a wire shaving process and has it’s own grading system which has nothing to do with micron, Bradford, or Blood Count. Steel wool is graded from 0000 to 4, with grade 0000 being the finest and 4 being the coarsest. The process by which it is produced gives the steel fibers a geometric cross section, meaning that each fiber has several long, sharp cutting edges. Because of this, it will literally scrape the surface of the carding cloth teeth clean and leave them smooth, clean, polished, and free of any scratches which could snag fine sheep’s wool fibers. Fine (grade 0000) steel wool can even be used to clean glass.

You will need:
Your new hand cards.
Some steel wool, Grade 000 (also called Extra Fine and 3 aught).
Some newspaper to work over and contain the mess.
Some junk wool.

Hand cards tend to develop a certain “handedness” and so should be marked as to “left” and “right”. When they are new, it doesn’t matter which is which but they will work better later if one is always used in the left hand and the other always used n the right hand so mark them now.

To condition the cards, all that is necessary is to card a bit of the 000 grade steel wool. Yes, card the steel wool! Since bits of the steel wool will fall while it’s being carded, card over some newspaper for easy cleanup. Do several carding passes, back and forth transferring the steel wool between the cards and making sure that all the rows of teeth on the carding cloth are used during the carding process. You can’t over card the steel wool. Then remove the steel wool and card some of the junk wool. Note if the junk wool fibers tend to stick in any particular spot. If so, card more steel wool, then more junk wool until the junk wool fibers are no longer sticking to the teeth. Once the teeth are nice and smooth, card several more batts of the junk wool to clean all of the bits of steel wool from the cards. Toss both the carded steel wool and the junk wool batts into the trash. Your cards are now nice and smooth and ready for use.

Note: If your cards have really nasty burrs, you may need to use a bit coarser grade of steel wool to remove the burrs but, if that’s the case, give them a final polish with the 000 grade for best results. Also note that old, well broken in hand cards will not need conditioning.