Dispensing – With discharge assistant – With discharge volume varying means
Patent
1986-04-21
1988-12-27
Huppert, Michael S.
Dispensing
With discharge assistant
With discharge volume varying means
222299, 222317, 222329, 222564, B65D 8854
Patent
active
047935235
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
This invention relates to a metering mechanism suitable for use in metering material such as seed and fertilizer in an agricultural drill.
Agricultural drills are often provided with tramlining devices that are associated with preselected metering mechanisms so that the discharge of seed by these mechanisms can be stopped at will, thereby to leave unsown rows in selected bouts that form so-called tramlines in the ultimate crop for the wheels of tractors or other crop treatment vehicles. The tramlining devices commonly take the form of linearly slidable shutters interposed between the seed or fertilizer hopper and the inlet of the metering mechanism so as to close off the inlet when tramlining. An inherent feature of this construction is that the shutter cannot stop the discharge of seed that has already passed through the inlet into the metering mechanism so that even after the shutter has closed seed will continue to be discharged until the metering mechanism has emptied. In the case of fine seed, such as oil seed rape, the metering mechanism may contain enough seed to sow a large part of a bout and thus tramlines will not be effectively formed.
In order to overcome this problem, other tramlining devices have been proposed which employ clutches that can be operated to disconnect the drive to the metering mechanism so that no material is discharged. However, the clutches used have tended to be complicated and therefore costly and often unreliable in operation.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
An object of the present invention is to provide a metering mechanism in which the problem of continued unwanted seed discharge is mitigated or overcome when used with a shutter type tramlining device.
A metering mechanism according to the invention comprises a housing with a material inlet and a rotary metering member that is rotatably mounted between side walls of the housing with its periphery exposed to a chamber within the housing so as to meter material from the chamber as it rotates, characterised in that a removeable insert is provided that is a close fit in said chamber and has a passage through it that communicates at on end with said inlet and at the other end with the periphery of the rotary metering member so that the effective volume of said chamber is reduced to the volume of said passage. Thus, if the metering mechanism incorporates the known shutter-type tramlining device in which a shutter serves to close the inlet to the housing, the quantity of seed retained in the chamber within the housing is reduced and therefore the length of a bout that will be sown after closing the shutter will be correspondingly reduced.
Additionally or alternatively, the metering mechanism according to the invention incorporates a tramlining device comprising an arcuate shutter member that is mounted within the housing so as to be rotatable about the rotary metering member between the periphery of the rotary metering member and the insert, thereby to open or close said other end of the passage under the control of an external control mechanism. Thus the shutter member serves to shut off the supply of material from the passage of the insert to the rotary metering member so that none of the material in said passage is discharged once the shutter member is closed.
Operation of the tramlining device is therefore immediately effective in stopping the discharge of material and causing tramlines to be produced even when sowing fine seed.
The arcuate shutter member may conveniently be carried on one side of an annular support member that is rotatably mounted in a circular aperture in a side wall of the housing and has a central aperture that receives the adjacent end of the rotary metering member as a close rotary and axially slidable fit. The external control mechanism may comprise an actuator, such as a hydraulic ram, and a connection between the actuator and an operating portion of the support member located externally of the housing. A tramlining device of this design is as simple as the known shutter-type of tr
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Bailey Alfred J.
Stone David E.
Huppert Michael S.
Massey-Ferguson Services N.V.
Pedersen Nils E.
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