The British Wool Marketing Board uses several tables, including the Bradford Count, to determine wool quality. These tables include fineness, staple length, presence of outer hair, luster, crimp, vulnerability to chemical damage, etc. For our purposes we are using only the fineness chart which gives the diameter of the fiber in microns (1 micron = 1/1000 millimeter). The information below is from the British Wool Marketing Board and other sources.


Animal Fiber Diameter (in microns):
Vicuna 6-10
Alpaca (Suri) 10-15
Musk Ox (Qiviut) 11-13
Angora Rabbit 13
Cashmere 15-19
Yak Down 15-19
Guanaco 16-18
Merino 12-20
Chinchilla 21
Mohair 25-45
Alpaca (Huacaya) 27.7
Llama (Tapada) 20-30
Llama (Ccara) 30-40

     Not only did the Incas have some of the world’s finest fibers to work with, but they had astonishingly sophisticated hand spinning and weaving techniques. Pre-Incan woolen goods found in the Lake Titicaca area have a weft count of 190-240 threads per inch which, amazingly, is finer than our finest percale sheet today. Other ancient samples show vicuna mixed with the hair of bats and the viscacha, a large chinchilla-like rodent of the high puna. A vicuna sheared annually produces just 6-8 ounces of wool.

      The fiber of llamas and alpacas varies greatly from individual to individual. (Though we refer to it as wool, what grows on Ilamas and alpacas is technically a hair because of its cellular composition.) Magnified cutaways show that it is a somewhat tubular hair with a medullated, or hollow, core, structurally different from the solid or corticated fiber of sheep and most other wool-bearing animals. The degree of medullation decreases with fiber diameter, with the finest Ilama and alpaca fiber having an interrupted medullation, or none at all. This unique structure may account for the remarkable warmth and insulating quality of camelid fiber, and contribute to its tensile strength and durability.

A study by F.H. Bowman shows the following relative strengths of fibers:
Human hair 100.0
Australian Merino 122.8
Lincoln wool 96.4
Mohair 136.2
South Down wool 62.6
Alpaca 358.5
The Inca civilization could likely not have thrived at its high, harsh altitude without the warm fleece of these native animals....

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