The Mechanical Handling and Storing of Material

140 THE MECHANICAL HANDLING OF MATERIAL whole conveyor can be driven by a belt 1| in. wide, the power absorbed being unexpectedly small. The skips travelling in one direction from the spinning rooms to the conditioning ' 4 i Fig. 193. Gravity Con- p I veyor for Large Indi vidual Loads. cellar, balance those returning in the opposite direction to the winding room, where they are taken off by lads. Thus the resistance is chiefly frictional. By providing finger trays on the chains and special grids at the feeding and discharge points, it is often feasible to arrange for the automatic picking up and delivery of packages. An example with the adoption of the finger tray system is given in Fig. 195. This takes bundles of loose newspapers from the printing room to the dispatch room of a London daily paper. Here, on account of the available floor space in the printing room being limited, it was necessary to run the conveyor in a tunnel below the floor, a cross section being shown in Fig. 196. The carriers are 6 ft. apart, and the capacity of the machine is twelve bundles per minute, or 720 per hour, equal to about 173,000 copies per hour. It runs night and day with intervals of rest. This analysis of the different types of package conveyors will be concluded by reference to a special form of pivoted or tipping carrier conveyor, provided with dis- charging mechanism, which can be thrown into gear at pleasure for tipping out the contents of the carriers at several delivery points, as shown at a, b and c in Figs. 197 and 198. It was erected in the year 1907 for the Gourock Ropework Co., Ltd., Port-Glasgow, for conveying bobbins 8 in. diameter and weighing 13 lb. each, at the rate of 400 per hour. The length is about 150 ft.