Houdaille Industries, Inc.

Radiant Technology Corporation

John A Buonauro

James L Frazier

Joseph S Romance

Thomas J Girard

Robert E McGrath

A furnace assembly for automatically transporting circuit board of varying sizes through a firing chamber and for maintaining heat within the firing chamber and preventing ambient air from entering into the firing chamber by having an adjustable twin-track rail assembly for housing and positioning conveyor belts which secure the circuit boards and by having baffle gate chambers in which a series of baffle gates maintain a constant atmosphere at the open ends of the firing chamber.

Furnace assembly for reflowing solder on printed circuit boards

A tool changing mechanism or assembly for a machine tool, which has a spindle for rotating a tool on an operating axis and has a tool storage magazine having at least one tool receiving means such as a socket for supporting a tool on a storage axis, has an improvement which enables increased distances between the spindle and the storage axis. The improvement is that a tool changing arm is mounted on a housing or a shuttle to rotate about a first axis and the shuttle is mounted on the frame of the machine tool so that it can be moved between two linear positions as the arm is rotated so that the axis of rotation of the arm is shifted in a linear path. Preferably, the arm in addition to rotating about a first axis is rotated about a second axis which extends along or parallel to the length of the arm so that the tool may be turned end for end as it is being transferred and the means for shifting the shuttle is driven by the same actuator that rotates the arm so that movement of the arm and shuttle are synchronized. In the preferred embodiment, intermittent motion of the shuttle is obtained by using an intermittent motion mechanism.

Growing community of inventors

Mission Viejo, CA, United States of America

John A Buonauro