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Has anyone tried to build their own feeder bowl?

Thunderjet

Stainless
Joined
Jun 24, 2019
We have an opportunity to get project that would require a vibratory feeder bowl. (I think)

Has anyone here tried to construct a feeder bowl from scratch?

Were you successful?

Any special ideas for places to purchase stuff like controllers and air tube mounts?

Just looking to mock up right now to see if this would even be an option.

Thanks in advance.
 
My impression is that bowl feeders, once you get beyond the very simplest designs, take a considerable amount of tuning, requiring some real specialized skills and experience. The basic vibratory bowl or centerboard bowl is not the hard part, unfortunately. The sorting, indexing, and conveying parts are the "skilled art" parts.

If you just want flat parts with roughly 1:1 aspect ratio (e.g., nuts or washers) to advance up a ramp and out of the bowl in single file, that's not too hard. If you need to line up parts with a larger aspect ratio (e.g., needle bearings), that requires more work. If you want asymmetric parts to be oriented consistently, that requires even more work, although headed parts (e.g., bolts or machine screws) are rather easier to deal with than some other shapes. If you want basically cubical parts to be oriented consistently, that requires a whole lot more work.

The sorting and indexing mechanisms are often ingeniously simple. But they take a lot of time and experiementation to perfect. If you're a specialist who's done this for decades, you already know what works in a lot of cases. If you are a generic machinist and hands-on mechanic, figuring it out from scratch could take weeks or months of messing about.

When I was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the late 80's, I ran across a collection of detailed studies of bowl feeders in the engineering library. It was the first time I'd seen that stuff anywhere outside of "how it's made" style industrial movies (which today would be Youtube clips). The only reasonably common place I've seen this sort of thing published is in the four-volume set Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors edited by Franklin Jones and published by Industrial Press. Volume 1 has about 50 pages of example feeding mechanisms, but there's nothing like a general introduction or guidelines; it's all just examples. The other three volumes are similar. There are probably specialized texts on this subject, but I don't have any to refer to.
 
Feeder bowls are a rather specialized art. Not only from the orientation of the parts but also the aluminum welding and polishing. I have not heard of any shop or business that has taken on the task of creating a feeder bowl. Might be a challenge.

Tom
 
I worked for a few years making automated assembly machines. Mainly to assemble small medical devices. We used a lot of Vibratory bowls from California Vibratory Feeders, they came ready to run from CVF. I don't think we had any major issues with their Feeders.

It's a dark art, there's ZERO chance you could succesfully make your own work, unless it's a very simple part that has to be fed. As well as the bowl, the chute coming from the bowl can be a complex part.

Plan A Get it quoted by somebody who makes Vibratory feeders for a living. One thing they'll need is a large quantity of parts that you need to have sorted and orientated and fed, one for designing the bowl, and also for testing and tweaking.

Plan B look at ebay https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=vibratory+bowl&_sacat=0 might be something that could be the basis of something you could modify to get to work.
 
Likely hard to beat used prices. They are fun to work with...you add knock-offs for all the possible positions of the parts, only allowing the position you want to proceed.
adding slide back ramps so falling parts don't damage others.
 
I'd go used. Every feeder bowl I've been involved with was at least 2 layers of subcontractors down. We hired the machine line builder who had a feeder bowl place who I think was subbing out the parts. Having them not shake themselves to pieces is probably a bit of an art. One older one at a former employer (probably made late 90's) were somewhat crude and had weld crack issues. It also had a really large (visible) oscillation. It was lined with 20* slant fabric like 3M Brushlon 331b which seemed to do a lot to keep the pencil sized/shaped parts moving. Any newer than that seemed to be robust, have really polished welds, and was more of a small scale vibration that wasn't plainly visible.

On the used front, IME if your part size is close to what the bowl was designed for they'll probably feed up the ramp. Watch some videos of bowls feeding similar parts and you'll get a few ideas of how to do directional sorting if needed. It isn't that complicated if you have a general idea of what you need to do, but some tuning of the feed mechanisms to prevent jamming or shingling can be needed.

Like anything else, you sometimes need to keep the bowl designers honest as the ones I've worked with really like to under-promise. I had a project where we changed a head diameter on a fastener just a bit and got met with a "That'll be $15k and 12 weeks, we have to start the design over from scratch." We ran a batch through the bowl and it turned out zero modifications were needed.

As for the actual bowl and ramp part, I don't know that it's a dark art, but I suspect it's close, or at least well guarded. It's definitely something I would hire done unless I wanted to get into that business, in which case I'd hire someone who already knows it.
 
One more comment, it might be a bowl, it might be a bowl with a conveyer set, etc, but it's almost certainly possible unless the parts would damage each other. I've seen a feeder that could automatically detangle and feed a box of stiff 3" clock springs without any great complication. If you can feed those you can probably feed about anything.

If you just want to test the orientation/rejection mechanism you don't need the bowl, just a hand loaded feeder ramp leading into the portion you're testing.
 
Feeder bowls are a rather specialized art. Not only from the orientation of the parts but also the aluminum welding and polishing. I have not heard of any shop or business that has taken on the task of creating a feeder bowl. Might be a challenge.

Tom

I've worked on lots of feeder bowls but never built one. Every one that I ever worked on was stainless steel. I don't think aluminum would hold up very well. And they are very touchy. We had hundreds of them in our plant but I never saw anyone build one. I have no idea how much it costs to buy one but it's probably worth the price to let the experts build them.
 
I've worked on lots of feeder bowls but never built one. Every one that I ever worked on was stainless steel. I don't think aluminum would hold up very well. And they are very touchy. We had hundreds of them in our plant but I never saw anyone build one. I have no idea how much it costs to buy one but it's probably worth the price to let the experts build them.

Ive had a little experience with repairing ones that were worn. I can tig decently, but I'm not a pro at all.

I usually tried to build up worn corners and ramps.

I have a little time to play with some ideas and I was just hoping the was a hidden guru lurking here to help.
 
I do some work for a company that pickles food.
When you walk in, it's like a flash back to a 1940 war time video.
These machine are part screw machine, and part bicycle.
There are chains running everywhere, and vibratory bowls with lids for various size jars.
They dump a box of lids in the top, and they shake out ready to be put on a jar.
They take apart certain assemblies, and replace 1or 2 pieces, but never the whole machine.
The maintenance guys have worked there since the early 80's, and say that if you get a machine out of time, it'll take forever to get it back.
Some of those lines have a rollercoaster looking cage that rotates a jar, fills it up with pickles, and flips it again after the lid is put on.
Watching a metal oil filter wrench hold a lid, while a belt sander with a rubber belt spins the lid tight is amazing.
When some of their stuff gets bad out of whack, they bring in some people from the north, and they get it lined out.
I know I'm off topic, but just want to point out how complicated this simple stuff really is.
As a kid I played that game mouse trap where you build that Rube Goldberg type assembly. This factory is a lot more complicated than that, yet looks so simple.
 
Here is a place that says they have a lot of off the shelf items. It wouldn't hurt to send them a sample:

About Us — Jerhen Industries

I would just send out samples to companies like the above to get a baseline on cost buying from an expert. I worked at a plant that had a bunch of Imobedorfs, which are rotary transfer machines. This was at an OEM but the set-up operators still had to do change overs. Dialing in the feed systems looked pretty tedious and there was a wide selection of them to use. Don't remember where they came from but the bowl collection were outside purchases and we had some pretty talented versatile tool makers. None of them ever touched a bowl. That is kind of telling to me.

P.S. Love the ads here, mine are showing a bunch of food dispensing pet feeders. If they had a water one they could have made a sale, my cat needs his water freshened 4 times a day and it gets old.
 
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Don't know a thing about the subject; but based on your notes and not knowing the level of complexity of your project, there are a lot of obsolete dowel shooter/feeders out there to experiment with.

MachineryMax.Com - Accu-Systems "DS-1" Dowel Shooter

I have one of these, bought for similar auction price (Ca $100) quite a few years ago. Turns out mine is missing an expensive part that meters/pumps/applies the glue or water mix. Otherwise, it does feed dowels out of the bowel, up a ramp, and aligns them to feed into a plastic tube that goes into the gun. There's not much complex about it - dowels are symetrical, and it does not matter which end goe into the tube for the gun.

If you are just experimenting, watch plant auctions for machines that will probably only get bid for scrap. Or old woodwhacking dowel shooters. :^)
 
A whole lot depends on the part being fed.
Dowels and needles are easy, screws not bad.
I had one that fed very thin washers about 1 inch with a big hole. One would think that easy.
The very slightness burr on the ID and jam. I mean not visible burr. By eye one could not tell good from bad.
SOP was to empty the entire bowl of near a thousand parts and scrap it all since no way to sort. Get a new box and try again.
Meanwhile we are down and the downstream line catching up to us fast. More than once we starved them which sends out a production alarm and now the big guys are calling or texting your phone.

They are so magic when they work. They are a huge headache when the jam even just once in a while.
I wonder what these designers dream about at night.
The first time I ever saw one in action I will never forget.... "This is so cool, how the heck does that work".
Bob
 








 
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