Device for checking the soundness of the cigarettes in a packeting machine

A device for checking the soundness of cigarettes fed to a cigarette packeting machine, a cigarette infeed hopper for said packeting machine, means to feed said cigarettes through said hopper in steps of one cigarette at a time in single file transversely to their axes, means to mount said checking device on said hopper, said checking device comprising a plurality of N in number of cigarette soundness sensor means, and cigarette ejector means all arranged closely adjacent the ends of said cigarettes as they move through said hopper and in predetermined spaced relation to each other with said ejector means downstream of all of said sensor mens, all N of said sensor means each performing a checking operation on each single cigarette step motion of said cigarettes through said hopper, means to coordinate the operations of all N of said sensor means and said ejector means together with the operation of said means to feed said cigarettes through said hopper to eject a faulty cigarette sensed by any one of said N number of sensor means by said ejector means, and said N number of sensor means being operative to detect and to cause said ejector means to eject (N-1) faulty cigarettes in succession and also to assure that every cigarette in said hopper will be checked as to soundness at least once.