|
|
|
|
|
|
by ssl-3
112 days ago
|
|
|
The nut dispenser is awesome. It occurs to me that the screw counter's main difficulty is in orientating the screws. The machine does solve that (as a product of all the shaking and jostling and doubtless unjamming), but judging by the length of the feeder tube it's not a very fun step. And the end goal isn't to have screws that are each oriented in exactly the same way, but instead to have a specific quantity of screws placed in each of a series of containers. All of that effort to orient them so precisely does make them easy to count using the nut dispenser mechanism, but that effort is otherwise ultimately discarded. I'm lead to wonder if the process of dispensing 6 screws could be accomplished more simply (ie, with less fiddling and shaking) by reducing the amount of orientation necessary. Perhaps by using a sorter that puts the screws in a line, axially, without a preference for heads-first or threads-first orientation? |
|
|
Here's a vibratory bowl feeder doing exactly that.[1] This is the industry standard way to solve this problem. Look what happens once the screws are lined up without a preference for heads-first or threads-first. A very simple slotted rack gets them all from horizontal to heads-up. As is usual with such feeders, if something doesn't land where it's supposed to, it falls back into the bowl for another try. That's the anti-jam mechanism.
3D printing vibratory bowl feeders works.[2] Useful for when you need to handle thousands, but not millions.
This is more scale than the clockmaker needs, though. Unless his business scales up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIPNdrbSYM4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECx6L7z0T4Y