RCC stations

The original Schiffli machines lacked automation in two areas:

Changing design repeats – i.e. changing the distance between the active needles, and

Changing thread colors – i.e. maintaining the distance but changing the active needles.

Technically both issues meant changing the active needle groups in some way. In the main, this has meant by hand. The key problems with changing manually are:

Downtime (loss of production) on the machine, and

Labor cost of doing the needle changes one-by-one.

Thus multicolored designs are expensive to produce because operators need to manually trim the threads and re-thread the needles. For this reason, many Schiffli designs still use a single color.