The present invention relates to apparatus for the head-to-tail stacking of articles which are substantially identical in shape and dimensions and which are successively presented to the apparatus with substantially identical orientation. Each article may be a single object or a batch of objects, such as a batch of folded cartons.
In the manufacture of packaging cartons a blank is cut, marked with fold lines and at least partially folded so that, when it is ready to be despatched to the factory which will fill it with a product to be packaged, the packaging unit is presented in the most compact form possible. The packaging units prepared in this way generally leave a folding machine or a folding/sizing machine one at a time. However, because of the partial folding, each packaging unit does not have a uniform thickness. In fact, one side is generally thicker than the other, for example the side which is to form a lid and has been folded over by the folding machine. It is for this reason that it is necessary to make provision for a manual operation to invert about half of the packaging units, so that the stacks for despatch, which have been made up head-to-tail, have the same thickness on both sides and thus form very uniform parallelepipeds having at least four mutually parallel edges perpendicular to the general plane of the blanks.
It is an object of the invention to propose a new apparatus which makes it possible to carry out, mechanically and reliably, the inversion of half of the folded packaging units and the formation of a stack for dispatch.