A professional who tends battery of automatic machines that heat and form plastic or nylon filament into spiral, serpentine, or ladder shape for teeth portion of zippers. Respnsibilities include:

• Mounts reel of filament on machine spindle and threads filament through guides and tension bars into electrically heated device (strip heater).
• Threads filament between forming dies and through cooling tube to takeup reel.
• Starts machine and observes filament for loosely formed spiral or tight kinks, indicating variations in temperature, and adjusts rheostat knob to regulate heat.
• Measures filament for conformance to specified dimensions of height, width, and spacing, using micrometer.
• Inspects samples of formed filament for height, width, and spacing of teeth, using comparator (shadowgraph), and counts number of teeth in specified length of filament to verify conformance to specifications.
• Notifies supervisor of machine malfunction.