Vibratory Feeder System for a Mining Pick

Situation:

At Hoosier Feeder we are proud to provide our customers with effective and practical feeding systems to orient a wide variety of parts.  A company in the manufacturing industry recently reached out to us to construct a part orienting and feeding system to deliver 30-40 heavy, metal parts per minute to a robotic handling cell for assembly.

Results:

The part, in this case, is a heavy mining pick weighing close to a pound each.  When feeding parts of this size and mass it is critical to accommodate for increased wear and noise to the machinery at every point of the process.  Beginning with the hopper, we made sure no parts would jam before they reached the feeder by opting for a more open design that did not tightly confine the parts in bulk.  Additional, we coated the hopper, and subsequently the feeder bowl with a thick and durable coating to not only decrease wear, but to dampen noise levels.  As parts fell into the bowl, a mushroom deflector decreased the falling distance once again cutting down on excess noise and damage to the feeder bowl.  As the parts feed through the system, tool-grade steel components oriented the parts and fed them to be isolated for picking.  Within 16 weeks we successfully produced of 2 of these mining pick systems for integration with the customer.