Document counter

Abstract

Apparatus for feeding, separating, counting and stacking documents at high speed. Documents are stacked in the infeed conveyor and are bottom fed preferably by closed loop belts and an eccentric wheel which continuously jogs the stack. Drive rollers support the closed loop belts which serve to feed the bottom-most documents beneath cooperative stripper means which assures the feeding of only one document at a time towards acceleration rollers and a cooperating platen roller for accelerating documents fed therebetween to provide a gap between succeeding documents to enable a sensor to accurately count the documents. Counted documents are driven from an outfeed location into a stacker having a floor positioned beneath the outfeed location by a distance selected to prevent incoming documents from being interleaved in their improper order and from interfering with the documents being fed into the stacker. The platen roller also serves as a backing roller for endorsing means. The closed loop belts serve to impart rotary driving force from the platen roller to the drive roller and the jogging wheel and also serve as the document drive means during the feeding and stripping operation. The stripping means comprises O-rings entrained about spaced first and second roller assemblies. The acceleration rollers are driven by the platen roller and drive one of the stripper roller assemblies through flexible drive means interconnected by friction drive speed reducing means.