Pai Lung and Karl Meyer: Where the Magic Begins

Reporter: Rocío Castañeda / Photographer: Israel Vera

ESIT equips its students with the skills and expertise needed to enter the textile industry with confidence.

At the Higher School of Textile Engineering (ESIT), students develop the skills required to operate, supervise, and control specialized machinery that supplies raw materials to major industries, including footwear, automotive, cement, and apparel manufacturing. To support this training, the school maintains an ongoing equipment maintenance and functionality program within its Knitting Workshop.

Using a Pai Lung circular knitting machine, which produces fabrics for T-shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts, and a variety of other textile products, students at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) learn how to operate equipment composed of two cylindrical structures, one of which houses 96 yarn feeders supplied with thread produced at the school itself.

Silvano Benítez Viazcan, maintenance supervisor of the Knitting Workshop, explained that the machine operates with 24 needles per inch and can produce approximately 400 kilograms of fabric per day.

“Students learn how to load the machine with yarn cones, connect them so the yarn feeds correctly into the system, and program the design through the cams, mechanical devices that convert rotary motion into reciprocating linear motion. They become capable of mastering the Pai Lung systems, identifying malfunctions, and verifying product quality,” he said.

The machine can be used to manufacture fabrics for footwear, the automotive industry, apparel, filtration systems, and even cement-related applications. Depending on the intended product, different yarns are loaded, and the machine is programmed accordingly, added the engineer, who graduated from ESIT in 1970.

From yarn preparation to the final fabric finish, future textile engineers at IPN gain comprehensive knowledge of the textile production process, an advantage that facilitates their integration into industry, noted ESIT Director Efraín Robledo Godínez.

Another key piece of equipment in the Knitting Workshop is the German-made Karl Mayer machine, dating back to 1968. The machine was successfully restored through a recovery and reconstruction project led by the expertise of engineer Silvano Benítez and engineer Juan Carlos Montes Silva from the Weaving Workshop.

“It is very rewarding to see the machine operating again because other people had previously tried to get it running without success,” said Benítez.

The machine has been fully operational for about a year following nearly three years of restoration work. Although relatively small and intended for laboratory use, it provides students with the fundamental principles of warp knitting, specifically tricot knitting, a two-needle technique widely used across multiple industries.

Despite the age of the equipment, its value lies in its functionality and performance.

“What students learn here are the core principles that will allow them to develop professionally and succeed in the industry,” said Montes Silva. For his part, eighth-semester student Diego Alessandro Rico Gómez emphasized that working with this type of machinery broadens students’ perspectives because these machines represent the foundation of all modern automatic and programmable textile equipment.