Eastman-kodak Company

Carl H Zirngibl

Ronald C Holzhauser

James F Wilson

Bruce E Crayton

Vincent J O'Brien

Document sheets are fed to a platen of a copier from two feeding apparatus, one of which is a recirculating feeder adapted to sequentially feed a plurality of document sheets of one document to the platen for copying information on one or both sides of each sheet. The sheets are circulated in a manner that results in the production of collated sets of copies. The platen also can receive one or more sheets of another document fed from a document positioner. The positioner can be used to feed a document that is too large to be accommodated by the recirculating feeder, or it can feed a document that may not be reliably handled by the recirculating feeder (such as a document made by assembling pieces of copy onto a backing sheet), or the positioner can feed documents comprising a single sheet. Also, the positioner can be used for making document masters that are then copied using the recirculating feeder.

Sheet feeding apparatus for use with copier/duplicators or the like

Apparatus and method are provided for cyclically controlling the metering of photosensitive sheet material into an exposure station, cutting the material to a selected length, exposing the material to form a latent image thereon and advancing the sheet onto a rotating drum upon which the sheet is processed by the application of heat. To minimize the size of the apparatus and to reduce the time between exposures of successive prints the drum is made relatively small but rotated at a correspondingly higher rate with appropriate processing time provided by having each portion of the sheet remain on the drum for more than one revolution of the drum. Rotation of the drum is controlled by a counting mechanism to ensure that the drum has turned a sufficient number of revolutions to fully process the sheet and remove same from the apparatus. The apparatus also controls a stripper element so that this element is actuated at an appropriate time in a print cycle to remove the processed sheet from the drum.

Growing community of inventors

Irondequoit, NY, United States of America

Carl H Zirngibl