Hi Roger, I used to work in the offices of a Copper Wire manufacturer and my husband did his engineering apprenticeship within the factory departments for part of each year. My department boss took great delight in taking the girls that worked for him on a tour around the factory departments where the wire was Drawn and coated in various materials. A wire drawer looks after a Drawing machine. A Billet, like an large ingot, of Copper was put into the first drawing machine and that would be drawn, kind of stretched, down to a finer state by the dies within the machine. The next machine along would have smaller dies than the first to draw the wire finer still, and so on down the line of machines. The copper would pass through each machine in turn until the correct thinness of wire was reached according to what was needed. Some wire was then either coated in an Enamel coating via another machine, while others were coated in cotton strands that were plaited around the wire as the wire and the strands of cotton were passed through the plaiting machine to be automatically coated with cotton strands forming a plait at it all went along. Look at the flex on a household iron to see the type of plaiting I mean. Some wire was made up of a number of strands of fine wire plaited together by another machine, the diameters of these plaits of wire varied according to what was required. These too would have a covering of one kind or another. In the case of the comber, neither myself nor my husband can think what job a comber would have in a Wire Drawing factory. I can only think that as the Maibery men were living in Halifax where there were a lot of Woollen mills perhaps they were changing occupation accordingly. Although they were experienced Wire Drawers perhaps, Thomas Maibery in Particular, was changing his occupation to become a Wool Comber but he noted both occupations on the census schedule in 1851. Hope this helps a little. Regards Jenny DeAngelis <<I have just identified a family in 1841/51 census records where a number of the men gave their occupation as "wire drawer" and in one instance the word "comber" is associated. Until I spotted the "comber" reference I had considered them to be simply associated with the metal industry. However, that set me thinking -always a bit dangerous! >>