A document feeder comprising a driven endless belt having resilient fingers on a portion of its outer periphery for frictionally engaging and advancing a single document at-a-time from a supply of documents positioned on edge. As the belt is driven through a feed cycle, the fingers engage the face of the document in the stack and advance the document through a gap to a transport station. The fingers remain in contact engagement with the document only during movement of the document to the transport station and move out of engagement with the document during the remainder of belt drive through a feed cycle to avoid smudging or marring the document, and to avoid engaging and advancing the next document in the stack until signaled or otherwise caused to do so. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION utilization In the feeding of documents such as, for example, tabulating cards, the feeding means commonly includes a reciprocating picking element which engages the trailing edge of the bottom-most card in a stack and moves the card from the stack to feed rollers for further transport of the card to a utilzation device. Although reciprocating knife-type feeders or pickers have been in use for many years, they are not completely reliable in operation and often cause damage to the cards during the picking operation. Thus, the reciprocating motion of the picking element tends to scrape and nick the edge of the card as it strikes the card to feed it from the stack, and when such a damaged card is fed in a subsequent operation, the knife may pick more than just a single card from the stack or it might miss picking a card completely. Another approach to feeding cards from a stack includes the use of a feed roller in frictional engagement with the face of the card to be fed from the stack. In order to provide sufficient friction to separate and advance the card from the stack, the feed roller is normally provided with a soft covering of rubber or the like. In those cases where the feed roller is in continuous contact with the card, to provide maximum friction for separating and feeding the card, the soft covering of the roller can adversely mark or streak the card. To avoid marring the surface of the card, the feed roller is operated intermittently into and out of engagement with the cards during each feed cycle. The momentary contact made by such intermittent operation of the roller is deficient for the reason that the force is not always sufficient for the separation and feeding of the card from the stack. Still other card separating devices utilize a roller having a toothed surface for gripping and separating a card from a stack. However, these rollers are also in continuous contact with the card surface and, additionally, require the use of a retard member driven in a direction opposite to the feed roller to prevent more than just a single card from passing through the gap. Another known separating and feeding device comprises an endless suction belt having a raised, smooth pad of friction material in the vicinity of each group of suction holes in the belt. However, while the pad might aid in the removal of the top card from the stack, it does not provide the resilient finger structure of the present invention. Therefore, this prior art arrangement necessarily resorts to the use of suction to afford sufficient gripping action to separate and advance the card from the stack. SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention provides an endless belt member having a plurality of resilient fingers for gripping, separating and advancing a card from a stack of cards. The belt may be arranged for continuous feeding, or it may be manually controlled or operated in response to a signal from a utilization device for intermittent feeding of cards on demand. It is an object of the present invention to provide a card separating and feeding device for seriatim advancement of cards from a supply in either a continuous or a demand mode. Another object of the invention is to provide an endless belt having a portion of its outer periphery provided with resilient fingers of material having a high coefficient of friction when contacting paper so as to separate and advance a card from a stack positioned on the edge to a feed position. Another object is to provide an endless belt-feeder in which the finger portions of the belt afford positive gripping action to separate and feed a card from the stack without causing any streaking or marring of the card. A further object of the invention is to provide a belt separating and feeding apparatus equipped with means for stopping belt drive in response to actuation by the finger after each card feed cycle when the apparatus is conditioned for a demand feed mode. A still further object is to provide a belt-feeder which can be used with various types of equipment for feeding a single sheet element at-a-time from a stack of sheet elements by means of resilient fingers provided on a portion of the circumference of the belt. The device is simple in construction, inexpensive to manufacture and reliable in operation.
A method and system for automatically merging and attaching documents, such as photocopies of remittance checks or the like, to envelopes from which the documents originated is disclosed. The system uses a series of bins and conveyors to automatically retrieve, synchronize, merge and reassociate each document to its respective envelope.
Sheet handling apparatus for separating sheets from a stack and transporting, registering and deskewing individual separated sheets, includes a single endless narrow width belt movably supported around at least two support rolls defining a path for sheet separation/feeding station through a sheet transport run to a sheet registration station. The single narrow width belt has at least one raised frictional contact element on its outer run for frictional engagement with a sheet to separate a sheet from a sheet separation station and transport it across an imaging platen to a registration station, single frictional contact element provides a single pivot about which a sheet may pivot when it reaches the registration stop member to be deskewed. In an alternative embodiment the device is used simply for transporting, registering and deskewing sheets.
A large capacity tray sheet feeder for a photocopier including a sheet stack separator and a transfer table for presenting a sheet to the photocopier where the sheet separator separates a sheet from a paper stack and the transfer table accepts the sheet and presents the sheet to the photocopier, and the transfer table includes sheet sensing means which control the operation of the separator drive motor.
A device for individually removing newspapers from an inclined stack, including a movable carriage which is placed over the stack, the carriage having an endless conveyor carrying spaced-apart grippers, the conveyor being connected to drive mechanisms to grip a topmost newspaper and feed it along the incline through a withdrawal slot.
