To avoid the problem of individual fibres of gauze bandages ‘catching’ on the roll below and preventing reliable unrolling, it is necessary to determine the force required to unwind the bandages from a roll. For this, a Zwick materials testing machine, of 10 kN capacity is used, together with a motor-driven unrolling unit. The sequence is controlled by a specially adapted program from Zwick’s testXpert^® II testing software.