US 5,628,166 AGranted

High speed newspaper bagger

AssigneeStepper, Inc.

InventorCharles N. Hannon

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Abstract

Folded and tied newspapers are delivered in a stream to an infeed conveyor which moves the newspapers in succession toward an inserting station where a stack of flimsy plastic bags are waiting. Just prior to reaching the inserting station, the newspaper is gripped by high-speed accelerating rollers which fire the newspaper into the open mouth of the inflated top bag in the stack. High-speed ejector rollers then clamp onto the bagged newspaper and pull it off the holding wicket for movement on down the line. A special, transverse, bag supply shuttle has two separate bag holding zones along its length so that one zone containing an adequate supply of bags may be presented to the inserting station while the other, empty zone is restocked with a new supply. During shifting of the shuttle, the incoming stream of newspapers is diverted temporarily so that no newspapers are presented to the inserting station during manipulation of the shuttle.

Claims16

Dependent claims

In a machine for inserting a supply of articles one-at-a-time into a quantity of flimsy bags, the improvement comprising:

an inserting station;
a conveyor for feeding said articles in succession toward said inserting station;
mechanism for successively presenting said bags to the inserting station in an open condition for receiving a corresponding article from the conveyor;
an accelerator between the inserting station and the conveyor for receiving articles in succession from the conveyor and propelling each successive article at an increased velocity into its open bag;
an ejector at the inserting station for receiving each bagged article as it is completed at the inserting station and sending it downstream in a delivery condition,
said mechanism including structure for holding bags in a stack at the inserting station and an air nozzle disposed to inflate the top bag of the stack just prior to arrival of the next article from the accelerator,
said structure including a shuttle having at least a pair of stack holding zones thereon.
said shuttle being shiftable relative to said inserting station to place a selected one of said holding zones at the station and to place a second holding zone in a location which permits access to the second holding zone for replenishing the stack of bags at the second holding zone while the supply of bags at said one holding zone is being depleted;
a low supply detector at said inserting station for determining when the number of bags in the stack at the inserting station diminishes to a predetermined level;
and
a diverter upstream from said accelerator for temporarily diverting articles from their normal path of travel to the inserting station and causing them to bypass the inserting station until an adequate supply of bags has been placed at the inserting station.

8 more elements

In a machine for inserting a supply of articles one-at-a-time into a quantity of flimsy bags, the improvement comprising:

an inserting station;
a conveyor for feeding said articles in succession toward said inserting station;
mechanism for successively presenting said bags to the inserting station in an open condition for receiving a corresponding article from the conveyor;
an accelerator between the inserting station and the conveyor for receiving articles in succession from the conveyor and propelling each successive article at an increased velocity into its open bag;
and
an ejector at the inserting station for receiving each bagged article as it is completed at the inserting station and sending it downstream in a delivery condition,
said accelerator including a pair of opposed, high speed nip rollers and means for relatively shifting said rollers toward and away from one another,
said shifting means being operable to alternately separate said rollers for receiving an article therebetween from the conveyor and to clamp the rollers against the received article for propelling it into the open bag.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.