I worked with a tactical gear manufacturer to improve the quality of their bartacks (a reinforcement stitch comprised of long-form straight stitches bound over by small zig-zags) used for their MOLLE webbing. A frame was built to hold lengths of Cordura webbing in a Juki large-field pattern sewer, but the default bartack programmed into the CAD system was too loose and unfinished-looking to pass the company’s Quality Assurance checks.
I worked with the QA team to determine criteria for a new pattern, and cleaned up the appearance of the finished sewing, as well as adding security stitches at the beginning and end of the sequence. Attention was paid to the thread width in the design of the vertical stitches to give a fuller look to the finished sewing while keeping a flat profile. The vector file was exported in .DWG format to be machine-readable for the Juki, and transferred via thumb drive to the control computer. The blue squares on the drawing below indicate needle drops. The image on the right is a physical sample of the sewn pattern. Sample is sewn with 4-strand T70 thread.
The clamping frame allowed the loading of multiple lengths of webbing with regularly spaced tack positions to speed manufacturing of MOLLE systems on the company’s products.