Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture – Methods – Surface bonding and/or assembly therefor
Patent
1995-08-14
1998-10-13
Simmons, David A.
Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture
Methods
Surface bonding and/or assembly therefor
156352, 156360, 156362, 1564422, 1564423, 271263, 27126504, B32B 3100
Patent
active
058207139
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a sealing machine such as is conventionally used for mailing documents without envelopes by sealing the edges of the documents. It is particularly applicable to pressure sealing machines.
A method is also provided.
BACKGROUND ART
In a conventional pressure sealing machine a document to be sealed is fed from a storage hopper and guided by rollers to a folding box for folding the document along predetermined fold lines and then fed through high pressure rollers to activate bands of pressure sensitive glue to seal the form or document into the folded position for distribution. Such forms are used for a variety of purposes such as pay-slips, library reminders and subscriptions amongst many.
A problem arises however if more than one document at a time is fed through the pressure seal rollers. The pressure applied by these rollers is very great, up to two tons and hence they are easily jammed if for example two documents have been fed simultaneously through the system or if documents have been allowed to overlap. This problem is known in other paper processing machines such as machines which fold documents to put them in envelopes and sensors have been used in those machines to sound an alarm. However, in a pressure sealing machine, due to the large pressures applied between the pressure rollers, a double document is more difficult to remove. In addition, the documents processed by such pressure sealing machines are often valuable documents (e.g. payslips) and their loss or damage in the machine needs to be carefully monitored.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a document sealing machine comprising a feed path supplying documents to a sealing arrangement, and sensing means arranged to monitor documents in the feed path to detect a faulty document and wherein preventing means responsive to the sensing means are provided to prevent such a faulty document from being sealed.
According to one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a document sealing machine comprising means for sensing the presence of double or overlapping documents in a feed path of the machine and means, upstream of the sealing means, for diverting the double or overlapping documents in response to the sensing means.
According to the present invention, there is also provided a method of sealing documents comprising means for detecting a fault in the feed path and means for diverting documents in response to the fault, before the document is sealed.
The sensing means may be a series of infra-red detectors measuring the thickness of a document in the feed path. A double document may be detected by calculating the average thickness of a document and overlapping documents may be detected by measuring the length of a document.
If a document is detected which would potentially jam the machine (as determined by pre-programmed parameters), then diverting means such as a vane may be activated to divert the double or overlapping documents into a tray for manual inspection.
These documents may either be put back in the feed tray at the beginning of the feed path, or alternatively a hand in-feed position may be provided in the machine between the folding box and the pressure rollers so that an operator can fold the diverted documents by hand and manually feed them into the machine for sealing. This hand-feed position is also useful for sealing test forms or damaged forms or for resealing forms which have been inadequately sealed in the first pass through the machine.
The sensors could alternatively or in addition, operate an alarm or stop the machine. Any one or any combination of these methods could be used.
According to a second aspect of the present invention there is provided a pressure sealing machine with a diversion means provided upstream of the pressure rollers. Such a diversion means provides a setup facility. Different lengths and thicknesses of documents require different setup conditions and often documents will
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Printed Forms Equipment Limited
Rivard Paul M.
Simmons David A.
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