Planting – Miscellaneous
Reexamination Certificate
2002-05-02
2004-01-06
Batson, Victor (Department: 3671)
Planting
Miscellaneous
C111S925000, C220S562000, C220S475000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06672229
ABSTRACT:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not applicable.
STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT
Not applicable.
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is related generally to agricultural implements and more specifically to an improved supporting and locking assembly for securing irregularly shaped particulate hoppers to transport assemblies.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In the past, distribution of seed (or other particulate material such as fertilizer) for use in a variety of agricultural operations has been facilitated via a planter apparatus including a wheel supported carrier frame having a hitch for linking to a tractor or other prime mover, an implement bar mounted to the frame perpendicular to the transport direction and a plurality of row units (e.g., 8 to 32) mounted to and essentially equi-spaced along the length of the implement bar. Among other components, each row unit typically includes some type of seed bin that opens downwardly into a dispenser assembly and some type of soil agitator (e.g., a coulter or knife member) juxtaposed on the transport side of the dispenser. During transport through a field the agitator is forced through soil there below and forms a seed trench. As its label implies, the dispenser dispenses a pre-selected quantity of seed downward and behind the agitator into the trench.
The individual seed bins generally have limited storage capacity. For instance, many row unit seed bins are limited to between one and three bushel volumes. For this reason, these types of planter assemblies required frequent bin refilling. Unfortunately, seed filling stations (e.g., typically a barn or other storage unit) are typically stationary and therefore filling exercises often required a trip out of the fields back to a station and then a trip back to the fields to continue the seeding process. These filling trips increased the overall time required to plant fields. In addition to the round trip time required to refill bins, the refilling process itself was tedious as each separate row unit bin had to be filled during each filling exercise.
In an effort to reduce the number of seed refilling exercises required to seed a field, the industry has developed systems including one or more large seed reservoir hoppers mounted to the carrier frame that are transported along with the row units. In an exemplary system, a main hopper dispenses seed to a plurality of individual mini-hoppers that each, in turn, supply seed to an individual row unit. To this end, the main hopper will typically form an upwardly opening cavity and will form, among other surfaces, bottom cavity surfaces that slope downward toward an outlet port in the bottom of the hopper. The seed may be fed from the main hopper's outlet port into each mini-hopper by, for instance, entraining the seed in an air stream contained in separate, individual seed transfer hoses that are connected between the main tank and each of the individual mini-hoppers.
When designing agricultural equipment weight should be minimized to increase transport efficiency. In addition, equipment should always be designed to minimize required maintenance. Moreover, the equipment should be designed to facilitate easy configuration set up and deployment. Furthermore, as with virtually all products, manufacturing and product costs should be minimized whenever possible.
One manufacturing process that has been widely accepted for producing general purpose light weight, rugged and relatively inexpensive containers has been the rotational molding process. To form a container using a rotational molding process, the internal surfaces of a multipart metallic mold are coated with an anti-stick spray and then plastic particulate is placed inside a cavity formed by a first part of a multipart metallic mold. Thereafter other parts of the mold are secured to the first part to form a completely enclosed cavity including the particulate where the internal surface of the closed mold defines an external surface of a container to be produced. Next, the mold is heated to melt the particulate and the mold is rotated about several axis to distribute the melted particulate across the entire internal surface of the mold.
After completely covering the internal surface with melted particulate the mold is cooled and, as the mold cools, the particulate hardens to form the container. To expedite the cooling process, hot molds are often placed within cooling rooms where large fans or other types of cooling units blow cool air across the external surfaces of the molds. After cooling, when the mold is opened the container is removed and may be further processed in any of several different ways. For instance, in some cases the container may be cut in half to form a two piece container.
Because rotational molding processes are relatively inexpensive to perform and provide rugged, light weight, minimal component and often complex containers (e.g., hopper containers including variously sloped internal surfaces), rotational molding processes would appear to be nearly ideal for manufacturing main hoppers for use with planter assemblies like the assembly described above.
Unfortunately, in the case of typical rotational molding processes there are several sources or error that render it difficult to meet precise tolerances. In particular, it has been recognized that as molded containers cool, often the containers will shrink or become otherwise somewhat distorted. While shrinkage would not be problematic if the amount of shrinkage were uniform throughout a container and could be controlled, in reality shrinkage is difficult at best to control or predict.
To this end, for instance, differing cooling environments can cause similarly molded containers to have different shrinkage characteristics. For example, where first and second molds are placed in a cooling room with a fan directed at the first mold and another fan only indirectly blowing air toward the second mold, the shrinkage characteristics can be different.
As another instance, while mold rotation is attempted to evenly distribute melted particulate across the internal surfaces of the mold, sometimes distribution is uneven so that one container wall or wall section is thicker than an adjacent wall or section. In these cases, during cooling the container shape can be distorted somewhat as differently thick sections are often characterized by different cooling and shrinking characteristics. Thus, where a stiff container section is proximate a relatively thin container section the thin section may shrink more than the thick section and may be caused to distort or slightly curl about the thicker section.
As one other instance, sometimes the anti-stick spray is not evenly distributed on the internal surfaces of the mold sections so that during cooling some sections of the container may stick to the mold while other sections of the container come unstuck. Again, as in the case where particulate is unevenly distributed, some sections of the container will shrink and distort to a greater degree than other adjacent sections.
While these distortions and different shrinkage characteristics are minimal in the case of small rotational containers, unfortunately the variances become greater as the size of the container is increased. In particular, in the case of agricultural main hoppers like the ones described above where a hopper may be as large as several bushels (e.g., 30-40 bushels), the differing shrinkage and distortion characteristics may amount to as much as several inches of hopper dimension variance. For instance, where a hopper includes front and back walls, the dimension between the external surfaces of the front and back walls may vary within a range of several inches (e.g., 3-4).
One problem with hoppers having dimension variances within several inch ranges is devising a mechanism to secure such hoppers to planter transport equipment such as a wheel supported carrier frame. Generally rigid mechanical solutions for securing the hoppers to a carrier frame do not work as the variable dim
Lee Laurence K.
Ozers Guntis
Batson Victor
Case LLC
Henkel Rebecca
Maurer Brant
LandOfFree
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