Patent ID: 6957553

Claim:
Method for the continuous wet stretching of industrial hides and other similar products, comprising the following steps: a) removal of uniformly wetted hides following a treatment with liquids, such as tanning, retanning or the like; b) partial pre-drying of the wetted hides so as to reduce their residual relative moistness to a value of between 35% and 65%; c) stretching of the pre-dried hides by means of localised mechanical stresses, applied in directions substantially perpendicular to the plane of lie of the hides so as to achieve a predetermined increase in surface area; d) drying of the stretched hides until they have a residual relative moistness of between 7% and 30% so as to stabilise and thermally fix the stretched hides; characterized in that, during the stretching step c), the hides are kept in substantially constant relative humidity conditions and in that said mechanical stresses are distributed over the entire surface area of the individual hides in a substantially uniform manner without any constraining in their peripheral zones, so as to achieve substantially uniform radial stretching over their entire surface area.