The vibratory feed system was designed to feed an M6 Flat Head Fastener at 40ppm, rejecting wrong length screws and delivering a count of four fasteners of the correct length to the customer’s receiving system. A laser sensor inspection station was integrated into the system’s feeding process to ensure 100% accuracy of part length at the final presentation.

View this short video that demonstrates the vibratory feeder bowl orienting the parts prior to inspection. Improperly oriented parts are detected by the rotary inspection system and are blown back into the bowl for recirculation. Correctly oriented parts are fed into the straight line track which transfers the parts to the customer’s assembly station.

The sorting indexer rotated counterclockwise with 8 indexing positions. The first indexing position received the fastener from the track. The part was positioned to allow the Part-in-Place sensor to detect the part and activate the hold back finger on the high track to retain the next part in queue.

The indexer rotated 45° to bring the part to the second indexing position.

The height detection laser sensor qualified the length of the fastener. The part was removed by the rejection finger at the third indexing position if it was out of the acceptable height range. The height detection sensor maintained a bad part bit in memory triggering the 3rd position slide to eject incorrect length screws through a rejection chute.

Qualified parts passed through the 4th indexing position to a loading position in the final indexing slot where the part transferred to the second linear track.