Patent ID: 7237773
Filing Date: 2007-07-03
Classification: B65H

Abstract:
1. A system for feeding and transporting documents, each document having a leading edge and a trailing edge, the system comprising: a feeder stage including a hopper assembly and a feeder wherein the feeder acts to feed documents singly, in order, from a stack of documents in the hopper assembly, the hopper assembly including a hopper floor that carries the document stack and a flag that provides a force to move the documents along the hopper floor toward the feeder, wherein the force provided by the flag urges the document stack toward the feeder and overcomes a friction force from the hopper floor to cause the document stack to move, with respect to the hopper floor and along the hopper floor, toward the feeder; a fixed force means for biasing the flag with a fixed force urging the document stack toward the feeder; a spring means for biasing the flag with a variable spring force urging the document stack toward the feeder, the spring force varying with flag position to cause each document in the stack to be fed with an appropriate force due to the spring force decreasing as the stack size diminishes; and a transport stage downstream of the feeder stage for receiving the fed documents.