Marquip, LLC

Richard H Thomas

Carl R Marschke

Gerald K Langreck

Dennis W Rodewald

William D Wendorf

A lockdown apparatus for releasably locking a coaxially mounted series of tool heads in a slitter-scorer machine includes an elongate locking member movable into simultaneous engagement with locking surfaces on each of the tool heads and a flexible membrane interposed directly between the locking member and the locking surfaces which membrane is flexed into and out of direct locking engagement with the locking surfaces by movement of the locking member. The flexible membrane may be used with either a rotary or reciprocal locking member and, in either case, the flexible membrane may be secured against movement with respect to the tool heads when they are locked such that unavoidable longitudinal movement of the locking member will not disrupt the critically accurate locked positions of the tool heads. The rotary lockdown apparatus utilizes an elongate cam of the type known in the prior art and, in the reciprocal lockdown apparatus, the locking bar comprises the armature of a solenoid.

Lockdown apparatus with intermediate membrane

A shingle handling and squaring device (18) is disposed between a sheet shingler (5) and stacker (9) and mounted above a stack infeed conveyor (19). The device includes a pair of side carriages (23,24), each of which carries a pair of freely rotatable longitudinally in-line tamping rollers or wheels (29-32), the peripheries of which are adapted to engage an edge of the traveling sheet material (6). The wheels are mounted for rotation about generally vertical but slightly inclined axes (48) and have tapered peripheries (51) so that the wheels nevertheless present truly vertical faces to the sheet material. The wheels are counterbalanced (56). In addition, when the stacker infeed nip roll (17) is raised by the entry of shingled sheets, a device (57-60) is provided to release the nip roll from the sheets to prevent binding. While the nip roll is released, the side carriages are moved transversely inwardly toward the sheet edges in a unique manner such that even off-center sheets are automatically and properly engaged and squared by the tamping wheels before the stacker infeed nip roll is re-engaged with the sheets. Furthermore, an automatic jam detection and releasing arrangement (72,73,57) is associated with the upstream wheels (29,31) and which is responsive to excessive upward wheel lifting about a transverse axis (45).

Handling, including squaring, of conveyed shingled sheets

A vacuum shingler for a plurality of sheets (9) traveling in succession through an upstream infeed nip (13) is provided with a vacuum modulating control which applies sheet slow-down forces primarily to only the tail ends of the sheets. In one embodiment, the control provides a substantially 'on-off' vacuum operation, with the vacuum 'off' when the leading end portion of the sheet is adjacent the vacuum plenum opening(s) (39), and with the vacuum 'on' when the tail end portion of the sheet is adjacent the opening(s). In another embodiment, the control modulates the vacuum so that it is at a basically unshingling low or reduced level when the leading end portion of the sheet is adjacent the opening(s), and is at a substantially increased high level when the tail end portion of the sheet is adjacent the opening(s) so that basic shingling occurs. The vacuum modulating control includes devices (12, 63) for sensing the position, speed and length of the traveling sheets, with this information being processed to provide an output signal which controls the speed of a shaft (52) with which a rotary valve is associated. The valve is disposed within the vacuum shingler plenum (34) and modulates the flow of air through the plenum opening(s) in correlation with the determined information. The vacuum shingler assembly is disposed so that its sheet input is substantially horizontally aligned with the discharge of the infeed nip (13). Furthermore, the assembly is disposed with its conveyor portions (28) generally horizontal, rather than inclined, so that even the middle of a sheet is supported thereby as the sheet spans the conveyor.

Shingling of delicate conveyed sheet material

A conveyor system wherein sheets (10) are conveyed from a cutter (9) or the like at a given speed, are increased in speed before passing through a vacuum conveyor shingling section (5), are slowed down at the shingling section and then normally proceed at the slowed-down speed to a stacker (8) which is adapted to stack a fixed number of sheets before discharging a stack. The sheets are basically handled in accordance with the device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,200,276. To prevent scattering of the sheets during shingling due to high input conveyor speeds and the like, the vacuum conveyor shingling section (5) includes a second (or pre-shingling) conveyor (38) upstream of the original shingling conveyor (15). The pre-shingling conveyor operates at a relatively high rate of speed while the original shingling conveyor operates at a relatively low rate of speed (which nevertheless may be as high as the device of the patent) relative to the sheet input speed. A setting control (40) is provided to pre-set the pre-shingler conveyor speed in correlation with the input speed of the sheets and the length of the individual sheets. The pre-set pre-shingler conveyor speed remains constant during operation of the device. Conveyors (15, 6, 7) downstream of the pre-shingling conveyor (38) run at speeds which are correlated to the speed of the supplemental pre-shingling conveyor (38).

Shingling and stacking of conveyed sheet material with pre-shingling

A device for cutting successive sheets from a traveling web includes a pair of thin-walled knife-carrying cutting cylinders concentrically mounted over fixed supporting shafts. To prevent ringing of the shafts at high cutting frequencies, due to resonant frequency interference, each support shaft is formed by a body having an inperforate cylindrical wall. The cylindrical wall of the support shaft is closed at both ends to form an uninterrupted cylindrical cavity extending from end to end of the cylindrical wall. Furthermore, and to prevent poor cuts due to changes in the alignment of the cutting knives, the amplitude of vibrations occurring at the time of each cut is reduced. The cavity of the support shaft is filled with a flowable vibration damping material which is not firmly affixed to the cavity walls and thus forms no significant part of the mass of the support shaft.

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Phillips, WI, United States of America

Richard H Thomas