The present invention is particularly directed to elimination of the current practice of using manual labor to remove printed and cut shingled sheets from a web printing press and loading them onto a pallet prior to folding the sheets. Then at a later date, the pallet is transported to an automatic folding machine at which another manual operation is used to remove the sheets from the pallet and to manually jog the sheets into alignment and then to place the sheets into a receiving hopper from which the sheets are fed by a bottom feeder into a folding station at which a device folds the sheets and provides a continuous outflow of printed folded sheets. The cost of these manual operations and the transportation of the pallets adds significantly to the cost of the ultimate printed fold sheet. Also, the pallets take considerable space and the transportation and storage of pallets are also space consuming. Hence, it would be more efficient to eliminate these separate operations and to be able to directly fold the printed sheets issuing from the web printing press.
It will be appreciated that the outflow of shingled sheets from the web printing press may be at a high rate of speed, for example, as many as 40,000 sheets per hour and that any folding apparatus connected thereto should operate at a similar high rate of speed without frequent breakdowns so that the web printing press may be kept operating at its full production speed.
The sheets leaving the web printing press are shingled on the conveyor and are not accurately aligned on the outcoming conveyor and can not be fed directly to the automatic folding machine because the sheets are too misaligned to be fed automatically from a stack by the existing folding machines. That is, the sheets are often skewed relative to one another with respective sheets being laterally misaligned, or turned slightly, and unevenly spaced in the fore and aft direction on the conveyer with the result that the sheets may not be directly fed into a receiving or storage hopper for automatic refeeding to a folder. Instead, it is the manual operator at the folding machine who corrects the misalignment of the sheets as he lifts the sheets and taps and jogs the same into general alignment prior to placing the aligned sheets into the feed hopper of the automatic folding machine.
Accordingly, a general object of the present invention is to provide an automatic folding machine with an automatic stacking station at which are collected and aligned incoming sheets so that the sheets may be automatically removed from the stack and folded by the folding machine in a continuous process.
A further object of the invention is to provide a new and improved automatic stacking and folding apparatus for connection directly to the output conveyor of a web printing press.