Atlas Pacific Engineering Company

Magnuson Corporation

Dwight A Blickensderfer

David Bullock

Tim Vaughan

Michael A Hoffman

John P Keeton

Christopher A Hildreth

Christopher G Theis

Ronnie Charles Neidigh

Denis Ralph Beland

Joseph V Polaco, Ii

Matthew S Howarth

Stanley M Miller

Michael H Fritz

Barry M Campbell

A system for automatically forming chunks and spears at high speed from unpeeled fruit items is provided. The fruit is sliced into unpeeled wedges. The unpeeled wedges are conveyed into a plurality of staggered transverse chunking blades, wherein the flesh, but not the peel, is cut sequentially from the center of each wedge outwardly, flattening each wedge. A peel removal knife is located to sever the peel of each wedge from the center outwardly after the transverse chunk cutting blades have cut the flesh. Spears may be formed by deleting some of the transverse chunking blades.

Fruit chunking and spear forming apparatus

Fruit chunking and spear forming method

An automatic corn cutting apparatus for cutting kernels off of husked ears of corn. The ears may be presented to the cutting knives either tip end or butt end first. The ears are fed into the cutting knives by a pair of drive rollers carried by a pair of articulating drive shafts. The drive shafts move in a plane perpendicular to the axis along which the ears are fed to the cutting knives. A sensor, preferably a linear variable differential transformer, or LVDT, is carried by one of the drive shafts remotely from the ears, i.e. the LVDT does not contact the ears. The sensor detects the profile of each ear of corn, and the profile is used by a knife controller to efficiently remove the kernels from each ear of corn.

Automatic corn cutter apparatus

An apparatus for coring and seed celling pears, apples, honeydew melons, cantaloupe and other fruits is provided in which a seed celler support tube is utilized to drive a seed celler knife and wherein a coring tube is utilized to rotate said fruit by one or more turning fins mounted on the coring tube. Separate and independent stepper motor drives are provided for the coring tube and the seed celler support tube. During a portion of the peeling process, the turning fin and seed celler knife are rotated at the same speed. In order to sever the seed cell, the seed celler blade is caused to either rotate faster or slower than the turning fin to sever the seed cell.

Seed celler having dual drives for turning fin and seed cell knife

Growing community of inventors

Pueblo, CO, United States of America

Dwight A Blickensderfer