doffer

plural doffers

1. textile manufacturingIn a carding machine, a device such as a revolving cylinder or a vibrating bar with teeth, that doffs, that is to say strips off, the carded cotton or other fiber from the cards; or a hand tool for the same function in smaller machines or in manual carding.
2. A worker who replaces full bobbins by empty ones on the throstle or ring frames. The job was often done by children.

   It has more varied exercises too than has the hand of the child who enters a mill. For though a doffer or factory child does use his hand all day long, it is but a very small group of muscles that is brought into activity.

   1907, Margaret McMillan, Labour and Childhood, The Child-Hand To-Day