ArtMetal

This is just a note to see how this works more than anything else. I have recently changed my full-time job, and am working LOTS of hours to keep up with a company that is very behind. Hopefully we will catch up sometime and things will slow down.

Been working lately on a set of wheels to feed a premeasured lot of angel hair pasta down about 12 inches to a conveyor bucket. Our wheels are moving at 50rpm, and each wheel fills 2 buckets per revolution. The conveyor is moving about 200 buckets per minute and the buckets are 10 inches apart. We are doing this with 2 wheels spaced at 50" apart so that every other bucket is filled by the other wheel. (am I making sense here?)

Having a time finding out how to keep the pasta in the cups on the wheel, while it turns over to dump into the conveyor bucket. First we thought of putting a tight "keeper" on the face of the wheel. That sounded like a problem as the pasta is so fine, and we would practically need to have a face to face fit. My boss came up with an idea to put teeth on the face of the cups in the wheel. Then we put a keeper made out of delrin with grooves for the teeth to ride in. We can have a 1/16 inch gap all around and still not let anything fall out.

The edge of the cup turned out to look like this (kinda-sorta) and the cuts in the delrin looked similar, but with wider cuts for clearance.

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(oh well, the ascii art didn't turn out.)

If anyone else has something cool they are working on, let's hear about it!