Decelerating mechanism for printed products

A method of shingling products cut from a longitudinally moving substantially continuous web of sheet material by a rotary cutter having a plurality of knife blades mounted in circumferential angularly spaced relation thereon so as to create, within a predetermined longitudinal length of said web, a plurality of irregularly spaced sheet products having leading and trailing edges, and wherein said plurality of products are conveyed in irregular spaced relation along a first conveyor path at a first longitudinal speed and thereafter conveyed along a second conveyor path at a second longitudinal speed less than said first longitudinal speed, said method comprising the steps of:

• providing at least one knockdown wheel disposed generally above and adjacent an upstream end of said second conveyor path, said knockdown wheel being rotatable about an axis generally parallel to a rotational axis of said rotary cutter and carrying a plurality of depressor members corresponding in number to said knife blades on said rotary cutter that create said trailing edges of said irregularly spaced sheet products, said depressor members being spaced about said rotatable axis of said knockdown wheel in substantially the same circumferential angularly spaced relation as said circumferential angular spacing of said knife blades on said rotary cutter that create said trailing edges of said irregularly spaced sheet products.
• rotating said knockdown wheel in phase relation to said rotary cutter so that each depressor member engages and depresses the trailing edge of the conveyed spaced product cut by the corresponding one of said knife blades carried on said rotary cutter at substantially the same angular position as said depressor member so as to enable the leading edge of the next successive sheet product to pass above the depressed trailing edge in shingled fashion, and
• substantially simultaneously contacting the depressed trailing edge of each successive sheet product with a brake pad so as to apply a braking force to and decelerate each successive sheet product as said successive sheet product passes between said first and second conveyor paths.