Abstract: A conveying system for bailed containers receives said containers after bail-application and with the bails supported in a substantially vertical manner advances the containers to and through a turning station. The container is first detected as to its presence on a conveyor belt and then by electric eye means a spot on the container is "read". If the spot is on the desired side no turning is performed but if the spot is detected on the opposite side the container is turned by raising a turning rail that engages the bottom rim of a container and causes the container to turn a half revolution. During turning the bail is maintained in an upright position by a magnet bar. The conveyors also may deliver bailed containers to a merge and stop unit having flow control means for delivering these containers in timed array to further processing, such as packaging.

Abstract: An arrangement for sorting a plurality of bottles, discharged from a bottle washer in random fashion, into spaced single file columns on a plurality of parallel conveyor belts arranged substantially perpendicular to the direction of bottle discharge. Guides selectively extend across the top of the conveyor belts in the direction of the discharge of bottles from the washer, and are utilized to divide the randomly discharged bottles into a number of fractional portions, with each fractional portion being directed onto one of the conveyor belts. The guides are side rails extending in the discharge direction of the bottles substantially transversely to the direction of travel of the conveyor belts. The guide rails serving a particular conveyor belt extend to the edge of that belt at which they are curved in the upstream direction from which the belt is traveling to facilitate an orderly discharge of a single column of spaced bottles onto that belt.

Abstract: An automatic packing line consisting of feeder conveyor belts arranged to bring products to be packed to a series of packing machines and of automatic feeder stations located along the said belts to distribute the said products selectively to the packing machines, is equipped with a recovery device installed after the last automatic feeder station to collect the products which have not been taken charge of by the said stations, a storage device for storing temporarily the products collected by the recovery device and an ejection device which evacuates the undistributed products when the storage device becomes saturated with such products.

Abstract: In a system for conveying bottles or like articles, bottles being conveyed in single file along two or more separate paths are caused to merge and travel in single file along a single path by a device comprising arcuate guide passages and star wheels rotatably supported in concentric relation thereto, each star wheel having a plurality of teeth with respective outer tips lying in a rotational path extending partly into the guide passage, each tooth having a special profile shape defined by leading and trailing edges, the leading edge having a concave arcuate shape of a radius of curvature which substantially corresponds to the radius of said circular cross section and extending from the tip inward to smoothly join the inner end of the trailing edge of the forwardly adjacent tooth, said trailing edge having a convex curved shape and extending outward to the tip of said adjacent tooth, said leading and trailing edges thereby forming a fair S-shaped curve.

Abstract: Method and apparatus for the controlled accumulating and feeding of piles of magazines from an input conveyor to a trimmer infeed conveyor. A flow director receives magazine piles and directs them to one of three parallel conveyor lanes, each lane including a series of independently driven conveyor sections. The leading pile in each lane is fed by a gate to the trimmer infeed conveyor while a restrictor restrains the succeeding piles from advancing. The procedure is repeated for each succeeding pile on each lane. Each section of each conveyor lane is provided with detectors for detecting stalled magazine piles. When stalled piles are detected at the downstream end of a conveyor section the adjacent downstream conveyor section is shut down. The traffic on the three lanes is compared and the flow director is instructed to not feed piles to a lane having an excessive backup of piles as compared to its neighbors.

Abstract: The device for the removal of rod-like articles from a hopper in which a bulk supply of articles is provided and a rotating fluted drum is arranged to form the bottom wall of the hopper so that the articles are removed from the hopper by being picked by the flutes of the drum, presents the feature that each flute of the rotating drum has a depth so as to be capable of housing at least two superposed articles. The flutes filled with the articles come out of the hopper zone and a stripper takes out from each flute just one article, while the other article, if two of them were present in the flute, is again inserted in the operational cycle of the flute.

Abstract: Method and apparatus for handling bottles and the like in heat transfer labelling and similar applications with increased processing rates. Bottles are delivered on a single lane conveyor, through a preheating station, and then routed through various bottle handling stations which separate the bottles into two groups to be handled by separate labelling modules. The two groups of bottles are then recombined in a single lane for further processing. The bottle handling apparatus consists of a dividing station, a crossover station, and a combining station. A bottle loading gate may be included to control the rate of feed of bottles into the single lane input conveyor. The handling stations include gates, for controlling the spacing of bottles, and diverters, for guiding bottles into selected lanes. The user may activate the bottle handling stations to double the labelling rate, or deactivate the stations to label each bottle twice.

Abstract: A mail processing system is described for performing several basic functions. The first of these entails the receipt by the system of mail in single file or in small clumps which arrive synchronously or asynchronously in a random manner. Secondly, the system stores or buffers the mail in an orderly shingled fashion wherein the first batch of mail stored is the first batch to subsequently exit the buffer. Finally, the third function involves the output feeding of the shingled batch of mail from the system to further processing equipment. The system may advantageously include for some applications one or more singulators for generating from the shingled batch, a defined stream of mail pieces separated from one another. It is a significant feature of the buffer feeder system that the above-mentioned functions are interwoven such that the system is capable of receiving and storing one batch of mail while concurrently feeding out a previously stored batch.

Abstract: A vibrating feeder for feeding disc-like objects such as coins to a subsequent work station such as a coin sorter has a unitary box-like structure provided with a particularly contoured bottom. The bottom defines a main flow path and an auxiliary flow path leading to the main flow path which in turn terminates in an exit for the coins. The auxiliary flow path has longitudinally inclined fins for guiding coins to the main flow path while somewhat retarding the flow rate to avoid jamming of coins and to avoid an excessive flow rate. Each flow path also includes one or more troughs contoured so that a coin will not lie flat thereon. The feeder is inexpensive to produce, is simple in execution and operation and provides a controlled flow rate for coins or other objects to the subsequent work station.

Abstract: A counting and grouping apparatus for receiving articles such as fruit, marshalling the articles so as to fill up a number of parallel supply lines for presenting a number of the articles in line abreast in the leading positions in the supply lines, the number in the line abreast being equal to (or a fraction or multiple of) the number of articles to be counted into a group and a moving belt conveyor bearing at intervals along its length lines of fingers in line abreast across the belt, which fingers align with the leading position of the supply lines and shift the line of articles in said leading positions onto the conveyor belt as the fingers pass the exit ends of the supply lines. Gates are described for blocking one or more of the supply lines to control the number.The fingers have an upright operating position for picking off the articles and a non-operating position folded down on to the belt.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for handling articles, such as pieces of timber, of different types. The articles are conveyed by a suitable conveyer to a location situated at the discharge end of the conveyor. Over the conveyer there is a series of compartments distributed longitudinally along the conveyer and arranged in different groups with the compartments of each group arranged with one of the compartments thereof nearer to the discharge end of the conveyer than the next compartment of each group. Articles of different types are respectively situated in the different groups of compartments.

Abstract: Apparatus for transporting containers to and from a working station comprises at least one intermittently rotatable transporting disc provided with a plurality of circumferentially spaced cutouts, which preferably extend in radial direction from the periphery of the transporting disc into the latter, and having each a length to receive two containers, while providing a clearance space for moving the containers in radial direction away from each other. The apparatus includes further means for feeding the containers into the cutouts, means, spaced in circumferential direction of the transporting disc from the feeding means, to discharge the containers from the cutouts, a working station between the feeding and the discharging means, and guide means for moving the containers in each cutout, during their movement from the feeding means to the working station, to space the containers at a predetermined distance from each other necessary for an operation to be performed thereon at the working station.

Abstract: Piles of sheets printed with numbered banknotes are cut into bundles, and the bundles are stacked in magazines of a rotary-drum bundle collector to form packets in which the notes are sequentially numbered, these packets being wrapped and then arranged in a serial ordinator. The bundle collector has two drums, one of which is slowly rotated to receive the successive bundles while the other previously-loaded drum is rotated step-by-step for unloading the successive packets. The basic installation may treat only perfectly printed sheets, but can be adapted to treat sheets with marked spoiled notes, by including a bundle-deviation line in which the spoiled notes of deviated bundles are replaced and the bundles remade and reinserted in respective gaps in the delivery before the collector, or a replacement station for simply removing bundles including spoiled notes and replacing them with bundles of notes from a star series.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for separating a generally rectangular array of containers into a single file line of similarly oriented single file containers. The array is comprised of a plurality of rectangular containers, some having transverse orientations and some having longitudinal orientations. The method of the invention includes advancing all the containers of the array into a number of lines of advancing containers, turning the containers with transverse orientations to longitudinal orientations, and converging the various transversely spaced and longitudinally oriented containers into a single file line of longitudinally oriented containers. The apparatus for practicing the invention may include a number of successive conveyor stations each having various conveyor means such as belts or rollers which sequentially advance the containers generally in a longitudinal path of movement.