Automatic collating machine

Abstract

An automatic collating machine for organizing into groups a flow of articles, such as ice cream sandwiches, fed to the machine to be packaged into containers includes a carrier feed station and a container loading station, both of which are located along a vertical path of movement of a plurality of equally spaced, elongate, flexible carriers that are moved around a loop including said path in a stepwise fashion. The articles fed to the machine are received at the carrier feed station where a preselected number of the articles are loaded onto an empty carrier thereat. Each time a carrier is loaded, the loop of carriers is incrementally advanced to move the loaded carriers toward the container loading station and to move the next empty carrier to the carrier feed station to repeat the carrier loading cycle. When a preselected number of loaded carriers is in position at the container loading station, the group of articles thereon is pushed off the preselected group of carriers through a suitable guide into a container such as a carton. In one embodiment, the articles are loaded seriatim onto the ends of the carriers at the carrier feed station. In another embodiment, the carrier feed station includes an accumulating table located alongside the carriers from which a preselected number of accumulated articles are simultaneously moved onto the side of the empty carrier, away from the end of the carrier.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.