Apparatus and method for brick blending
AssigneeLingl Corporation
InventorHans Lingl, Jr.
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Apparatus and method for more uniformly blending a layered stack of bricks having a central core section of lesser hardness and lighter color than in a surrounding outer shell section. The bricks are first unloaded from a hack into layers which include a corresponding core section and surrounding shell section. Thereafter, the bricks in each alternate layer are rearranged by placing bricks from the normally occurring core section areas into the normally occurring shell section areas and vice versa. Then the layers of bricks (both rearranged and unaltered) are restacked. The resulting stack will be blended such that when each "slice" of the stack is strapped into a packaged group of bricks, the resulting packaged groups will have approximately equal numbers of bricks having differing degrees of hardness and color.
Claims12
Apparatus for blending a layered stack of bricks having a central core section of lesser hardness and lighter color than in the surrounding outer shell section, said apparatus comprising:
- means for unloading the stack into layers which each include a corresponding core section and shell section,
- means for rearranging the bricks in each alternate layer by placing bricks from the normally occurring core section areas into the normally occurring shell section areas and from the normally occurring shell section areas into the normally occurring core section areas, said means comprising means for gripping the bricks in a first half as a first group, means for gripping the bricks in the remaining half as a second group, and means for moving the gripped first and second halves relative to one another to reverse their respective relative positions, and
- means for restacking all the layers into a blended stack.
Apparatus for blending a layered stack of bricks having a central core section of lesser hardness and lighter color than in the surrounding outer shell section, said apparatus comprising:
- means for unloading the stack into layers which each include a corresponding core section and shell section,
- means for rearranging the bricks in each alternate layer by placing bricks from the normally occurring core section areas into the normally occurring shell section areas and from the normally occurring shell section areas into the normally occurring core section areas, said means comprising first means for gripping a first group of bricks in the layer as a group, second means for gripping a second group of bricks in the layer as a group, and means for rotating said first and second means by substantially 180.degree., and
- means for restacking all the layers into a blended stack.
Apparatus for blending a stack of bricks comprising a plurality of vertically superimposed layers, each layer comprising a plurality of bricks, said stack having a central core section of lesser hardness and lighter color than in the surrounding outer shell section thereof, said apparatus comprising
- means for unstacking an entire first layer of bricks from said stack, said layer including a corresponding core section and shell section, and for unstacking an entire second layer of bricks from said stack, said layer including a corresponding core section and shell section,
- means for transporting said second layer to a rearranging position,
- means for rearranging bricks within said second layer with respect to each other, to place bricks from the normally occurring core section areas into the normally occurring shell section areas and vice versa,
- means for transporting said first and second layers to a restacking position,
- means for restacking said first and second layers of bricks with other layers to form a new stack having increased uniformity in the spatial distribution of bricks having different hardness and color characteristics.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.