Orienting & Presentation for Sphyerical Parts
Instead of using a typical outside construction bowl a ball bearing feeder only utilizes the interior bowl band for storage and part selection. The discharge tubes are fab’d in on the lower bottom and vibration/gravity does the rest of the work. Parts such as ball bearings, pellets, BB’s and other spherical characteristics are suitable for these types of systems. A lower cam is placed to sweep everything above a single layer of parts. Near that cam is a cavity where all the bearings feed into prior to entering the lower discharge tube. Once the parts make their way through the tube a couple options can be added for part presentation. Some customers elect to elevate the system and add a flexible line directly to the discharge. Another option is adding a vacuum conveying pump for blow feeding each line of feed. These pumps can be placed directly on the bowl discharge or somewhere in-line directly on the tube feed. This added flexibility makes it easy for the system to be placed anywhere in the facility without interfering with the existing station.
In some instances a machine cell may require multiple lanes of feed to supply different locations of the assembly. Using a single lane ball bearing feeder can only produce a max volume out of one line(100-400+ PPM estimated). Incorporating multiple lanes of feed can boost the overall volume without the need to purchase an additional feeder. The added fabrication work is minimal and the system performance does not get impacted as long as the bowl has a continuous supply of parts to keep all lines populated. To keep the part level at the appropriate levels we recommend adding a bowl level control to each system. These can be supplied by us or the customer to send a signal out when the bowl level drops under a certain level. These signals can be ran back to any PLC or can be used to simply turn on a stack light indicating the bowl level needs to be replenished. Let us know how we can help on your next ball bearing project!