Circular Loom Manufacturer: How to Check a Chinese Supplier

A circular loom manufacturer is easy to verify and almost nobody does it, because the questions that settle it are not about the loom at all. They are about which parts of it are cut on the supplier's own machines, whether the design is theirs, and whether they will state a speed with the material it was measured on. This page sets out eight checks you can apply to any circular loom supplier and answers each with our own figures. Yanfeng Group Co., Ltd. has built plastic weaving machinery in Pingyang, Wenzhou, Zhejiang since 1987 — originally as the Pingyang Plastic Machinery General Factory — and every number below comes from our company data, our product pages and our catalogue. For the machine comparison rather than the supplier question, start from our circular loom buyer's guide.

Key definitions

• Manufacturer: the company that machines, heat-treats and assembles the loom and whose name is on the nameplate — not the exporter or the agent who sends the quotation.
• Circular loom: the machine that weaves PP or HDPE flat yarn into a continuous woven tube for sacks, in four- or six-shuttle form.
• Lay-flat width (folding width): the flattened width of the woven tube, and the loom's working range.
• Maximum warp count: the greatest number of warp tapes the loom can carry, which fixes the finest weave available at a given width.
• Little-cam loom: our oil-free design in which small cams and a swing-arm heddle drive form the shed, with rolling transmission throughout and no lubricant.
• Suspension loom: the shuttles ride on a suspension roller system instead of rolling on the warp tape.
• Liner-inserting loom: a hollow-shaft loom that weaves the tube around a film liner, so one machine makes plain and lined sacks.

Eight checks, and our answers

#	What to check	Why it matters	Yanfeng Group
1	Factory address, not an office address	An agent can quote any catalogue; only a maker can be visited and audited	Wuyang Industrial Zone, Pingyang, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, 325401 — 60,000 m² of construction area, operating since 1987
2	Which loom parts are machined in-house	Cams, door rings, swing-link stands and shuttles set the loom's speed and its life; bought-in parts mean tolerances the supplier does not control	200+ machine tools, 60+ of them high-precision CNC machines and test machines. Six entries on our equipment list are loom-specific: five five-axis linkage milling machines for little cams, seven four-axis linkage CNC centres for swing-link stands, a five-axis linkage centre for shuttles, four CNC gantry centres for loom bases, five CNC machine tools for the suspension door ring, and a CNC grinding machine to finish-grind it
3	Separate assembly, or a shared floor	A loom assembled between other machines is a loom nobody owns	Four dedicated assembly workshops — tape drawing, circular loom, tape winding and lamination
4	Own design, or a copy	Only a designer can change the machine for your bag, your yarn or your voltage	The swing-arm oil-free little-cam loom, developed in 2008 and described in our catalogue as an initiate in China (patent ZL200820166333.1); the dust-covered swing lever (patent ZL201310737523.X); the four-shuttle suspension loom developed 2017 and in production from early 2018, with direct-drive four- and six-shuttle versions in the second half of 2018. Company-wide: 109 national invention and utility-model patents and a provincial high-tech enterprise R&D centre
5	Speed quoted with the material	A speed measured on virgin yarn is not the speed your recycled yarn will run	Our catalogue states the suspension four-shuttle loom at 250 r/min on new material and 200 r/min on recycled or filling master material, and the six-shuttle at 180 r/min; the little-cam looms are tabled at 180, 160 and 125 r/min maximum by width, and the little-cam product page states that yarn made from 100% regenerated plastic can be woven
6	Range against your bag, not a flagship model	A supplier with one loom will push you onto the wrong width or shuttle count	Nine looms in the circular loom range: four- and six-shuttle suspension, four- and six-shuttle little-cam, two liner-inserting looms, two high-speed mesh-bag looms and one big-sized loom for tarpaulin and container bag
7	CE and quality certification, model by model	A company-level claim is not certification of the machine you are buying	Eight of our nine looms are listed CE in the catalogue; the big-sized tarpaulin and container-bag loom is not. Company-wide: ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001, CE certification for machinery and National Intellectual Property Management System certification, plus National Intellectual Property Advantage Enterprise from the State Intellectual Property Office
8	Spare parts and after-sales, in writing	A loom outlives the order and you will buy shuttles, rollers and belts for years	A standing After-sales & Spare Parts division alongside the International Trade Department; machinery supplied to more than 80 countries and regions, including Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Kenya, Zambia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan

The ten fields a quotation must fill

Check 7 and check 5 both reduce to the same discipline: make every supplier fill the same fields, then compare the filled forms rather than the sales language. These are the ten our own tables print, with two of our looms as worked examples — one suspension machine and one wide little-cam machine, deliberately at opposite ends of the range.

Field	Suspension four-shuttle YF-XT-750/4X	Little-cam four-shuttle YF-XT-1400/4
Shuttle count	4	4
Lay-flat width (mm)	300–750	700–1400
Maximum warp count	576 / 640 / 768	1040
Maximum speed (r/min)	240 on the product table; catalogue 250 new material / 200 recycled	90–125
Production	120–130 m/h	0.9–1.25 m/min at 40 warps / 100 mm
Main motor power (kW)	2.2	3 / 4
Gross motor power (kW)	2.7	3.5 / 4.5
Installing dimensions L×W×H (mm)	8300×2200×2730	9800×2500×2960
Weight (kg)	1800	2500
CE in catalogue	yes	yes

Three things to notice in that table, because they are the things suppliers leave out. Production is quoted on different bases — metres per hour on one machine, metres per minute at a stated weft density on the other — so convert both to bags per shift yourself before comparing. Motor power comes in two numbers, main and gross, and only the gross figure sizes your switchboard; the little-cam machine's two values are the two motor options offered at that width. And the speed field needs two entries, not one: a number and the material it was measured on. Where our product page and our catalogue print different figures for the same machine, the catalogue table is the one we stand behind, and on the suspension loom the catalogue's figures are the ones that separate new yarn from recycled.

What "in-house" means on our site

Check 2 is the one that separates manufacturers from assemblers, so it is worth being specific rather than rhetorical. A circular loom's speed ceiling and its service life are set by a small number of hard parts. On a little-cam loom those are the cams themselves and the swing-link stands; on a suspension loom they are the door ring and the suspension rollers; on every loom they are the shuttles. Our machining list names dedicated equipment for each: five five-axis linkage milling machines cutting little cams, seven four-axis linkage CNC centres on swing-link stands, a five-axis linkage centre on shuttles, four CNC gantry centres on loom bases, five CNC machine tools on the suspension door ring and a CNC grinding machine to grind it finely. Alongside them sit a CNC gantry centre for tape-drawing die heads, a computerised balancer for tape-drawing rollers, a CNC horizontal centre for critical parts and a separate parts-machining workshop. The shop photographs and the full equipment list are on our production capacity page, and the company history is on the about page.

The practical consequence for a loom order is that the parts which decide whether the machine still runs at rated speed in year five are cut and inspected on equipment we own. The same argument, applied to gears instead of cams, is set out in our gear reducer manufacturer checks.

Our recommendation for sourcing a loom

Do not start from a country, a price or a brochure. Start from five numbers — bag size, bag grammage, daily output in bags, the yarn you will actually run (virgin, recycled or filled), and whether the sack needs a liner — and ask two or three suppliers to return the ten fields above for a specific model. A supplier who answers with a model number and no warp count has not matched the loom to your fabric. A supplier who quotes one speed without naming the material has quoted their best case. A supplier who cannot name the machine tool that cuts their cams is selling someone else's loom. All three are knowable before the order, and all three are cheaper to find out now than after commissioning.

Send those five numbers, or simply describe the sack and the output you need, through the enquiry form. Our International Trade Department returns a model, the ten fields filled in, and a layout drawing; where the loom sits in the whole plant, from extrusion to sewing, is set out in our PP woven bag machine production line guide, and the specifications of all nine machines are compared in our circular loom round-up and listed under plastic machinery. Office hours are Monday to Saturday 08:00–17:30 and Sunday 09:00–17:30, China Standard Time (UTC+8).