A series of narrow and tall above-ground stainless steel tanks define independent brining cells into which cheese blocks are conveyed by common inlet and outlet flumes. Each cell has a removable conveyor assembly having a looped plastic link belt driven around a frame by an electric motor. Projecting plastic flights on the belt engage infed cheese blocks, and submerge a series of rows of blocks. An infeed flume delivers a stream of cheese blocks to a cell. Once a level below a flight is filled, ...

An automatic, poultry wing portioning system that employs a linear path throughout the entire portioning process. The system portions the wings into their constituent parts by moving the wings, supported by uniquely designed carriers, via conveyor into engagement with a series of adjustably mounted, stationary knives that depend from an overhead support frame into the linear path of the wings. The knives are displaced laterally and longitudinally from one another and are oriented with their shar...

A configurable storage system particularly suited for use with clean environment conveyors is disclosed. The storage system includes modular conveyor track elements which may be provided as one way paths which, when provided with plural transfer elements with respect to a conveyor highway, enable the rotation of a workpiece from a storage matrix to a transfer path and back to the storage matrix.

A method of forming elongated heat exchange fins from a continuous sheet of material having a width equal to a multiple of the width of a single fin and of collecting the fins in stacked relationship including the following steps: forming the sheet into longitudinally continuous adjacent fin strips with a width equal to the width of the fins, severing each fin strip into finite length fins with the ends in adjacent strips being longitudinally staggered and the ends in alternate strips being tran...

An automatic conveyorized volumetric container filler is provided and consists of a mechanism to pump a predetermined amount of fluid from a reservoir into containers by using volumetric piston pumps operated by a pump drive cylinder. The containers are automatically conveyed to a plurality of filling nozzles for receiving the fluid therefrom so that after the containers are filled, they can be conveyed away to be capped.

A vehicle-mounted roller conveyor has three parallel sets of rollers with two aisles therebetween. A restraining member in each aisle movable laterally and downwardly is biased to a raised position in which it is interengageable with the side of a container which overlies only two of the sets of rollers. If a container completely overlies the aisle itself, an inclined actuating shoe engageable by the container moves the restraining members out of the way.

An oven employing electromagnetic radiation as a source of heat is adapted for use in the mass preparation of complete pre-frozen or refrigerated meals such as in institutional feeding environments and the like. Each meal is prepackaged and contained in a single radiation transparent tray with the various individual foods of the meal being located in selected predetermined compartments of the tray. The oven includes a lower conveyor belt which carries the tray through the oven and an upper conve...

This invention relates to conveyorized cooking apparatus and particularly to such apparatus useful in a commercial environment such as a fast service restaurant in which rapidly changing variable loads must be accommodated. This invention accomplishes conveyorized cooking of servings of foodstuffs in such a way that the effects of variations in load are minimized or eliminated by eliminating or reducing the infuence of stored thermal energy on cooking capabilities so that stored energy may be es...

A conveyorized transport system which can be used to transport workpieces to a series of subsidiary loops, comprises a main rail, workpiece carrying trolleys movable on the main rail, a subsidiary loop adjacent to the main rail which leads to a work station, a special switch to transfer a trolley between the main rail and the subsidiary loop, and a computer to track and control the movement of the workpieces. The main rail and the subsidiary loop each have a gap laterally spaced from one another...

A conveyorized sorting and distribution system for the handling of packages of documents or other items includes an infeed conveyor in tandem with an inclined conveyor and a plurality of vertically adjustable conveyor divider plates positioned above the infeed and inclined conveyors to divide the conveying surfaces into a plurality of individual sorting lanes. The infeed and inclined conveyor belts have a plurality of longitudinal grooves therein which may be created by and are aligned with the ...