Belt-feed trim and form method

Abstract

A method is provided that increases the efficiency of material handling apparatus, such as those used to trim and form electrical leads on solid state electrical devices. The method uses a plurality of rotatable pulleys, an endless belt capable of retaining devices to be processed that is disposed around the pulleys such that rotation of the pulleys will cause said belt to travel around said pulleys, and a plurality of paired tooling members, each of said paired tooling members having first and second tooling members disposed on opposing sides of the belt and directly opposing so as to cooperate and perform a tooling operation on the leads when reciprocated toward each other along a common axis. In a preferred embodiment, two horizontally aligned pulleys with vertical axes of rotation are used to rotate the belt in a horizontal plane. The electrical devices are contained in a lead frame which is retained by pins on the belt which pass through indexing holes in the lead frame and the faces of the electrical devices are vertically oriented. The first and second tooling member are horizontally reciprocated by a common cam to perform the tooling operations on the electrical devices and the rotation of the belt is synchronized with the reciprocation of the tooling members. Alternatively, the first and second members can be driven by different cam drives that are synchronized in conjunction with the rotation of the pulleys and the relative orientation of the pulleys, the belt, and the electrical devices can be varied to accommodate specific tooling or spacing requirements.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.